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THE DOCTRINE OF 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST 








PERSON OF CHRIST 


y. BY 


SYDNEY CAVE,'M.A., D.D: 


PRESIDENT OF CHESHUN T COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 


NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
1925 


All rights reserved 


Printed in Great Britain at 
The Mayflower Press, Plymouth. William Brendon & Son, Ltd. 


PREFACE 


THE purpose of this book is defined by the nature of the 
series for which it has been prepared. It is not written for 
scholars or theologians, but in the hope that it may be of 
use, not only to theological students and to clergy and 
ministers, but also to educated laymen, who may be glad 
to have a concise account of the development of the doc- 
trine of Christ’s Person in the light of present problems and 
recent research. In at least one section of the book—that 
dealing with the Eastern controversies on the nature of the 
incarnate Person—the subject matter is such as to make 
simple description almost impossible, but the writer has 
spared no pains to write as clearly as he could, whilst at 
the same time avoiding those facile generalisations which 
are often interesting but are seldom true. 

The writer can scarcely expect that this book will win 
the approval of either of the two extremes of the modern 
Church. To those who see in Christ only the greatest of 
human teachers, there can be no special doctrine of His 
Person ; whilst to those who hold that the historic Creeds 
are final, not in content only, but in terminology, the latter 
chapters of this book must appear irrelevant and unneces- 
sary. ‘To the writer neither way of escape from the problem 
of Christ’s Person is open, and he has sought to describe as 
precisely as the limits of his space allowed the chief attempts 
to reinterpret this doctrine in language intelligible to our 
age, and, in the final chapter, has ventured to suggest what 

5 


6 PREFACE 


seems to him the true approach—an approach which makes 
belief in Christ’s divinity, not an added burden to our faith 
in God, but its one adequate support. 

The book is based on notes of lectures given to students 
of this College, and owes much to their criticism and in- 
terest. The writer has to express his gratitude to friends 
in Cambridge who have read all or part of the MS. and made 
valuable suggestions; especially to Dr. Maldwyn Hughes, 
the Principal of Wesley House ; to the Rev. E. W. Johnson, 
B.D., Tutor of Cheshunt College; and to Mr. Bernard 
Manning, Fellow of Jesus College. Most of all is he in- 
debted to one of his students, Mr. R. G. Martin, B.A., for 
his patient help in the preparation of the MS. for the Press 
and the correction of the proofs. 


CHESHUNT COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, 
May, 1925. 


CONTENTS 


PREFACE 

THE JESUS OF THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS , 
SomME NEw TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS 
THE First Two CENTURIES 

THE EASTERN CHURCH . ° 4 ° 


THE CHURCH OF THE WEST TO THE REFORMA- 
TION es e ° e e e 


THE REFORMATION fe ‘ x 


SCHLEIERMACHER AND His SuccESsSsORS 


RiTscHL AND THE MopERN PERIOD 3 
Our PRESENT PROBLEM i 
BIBLIOGRAPHY , ; ; \ 


INDEX . 


122 
136 
160 
189 
227 
249 
257 


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THE DOCTRINE 
OF THE PERSON OF CHRIST 


I 
THE JESUS OF THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS 


THE question of Jesus to His disciples, ‘Who say ye 
that I am ?”’ seemed to many a generation ago to have 
been solved, and, in Germany especially, there were 
numerous accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching, written by 
those who claimed to have stripped off from Christ the 
stiff vestments of ecclesiastical tradition, and to have 
discovered the actual Jesus of the Gospels, a gracious 
figure, whom we modern men could readily appreciate 
and understand. To-day that confidence is largely gone. 
In the judgement of some of our most competent scholars, 
this so-called Jesus of the Gospels is not the historic 
Jesus, but the reconstruction of the modern mind,! and 
the most confident assertions made to-day about Jesus 
come from those who claim, not that He is known, but 
that He is unknown and unknowable, incapable of modern- 
isation, and to be interpreted through just those phases 


1 As Schweitzer puts it, in his exuberant way, “ Formerly it was possible to 
book through-tickets at the supplementary-psychological-knowledge office which 
enabled those travelling in the interests of Life-of-Jesus construction to use 
express trains, thus avoiding the inconvenience of having to stop at every little 
station, change, and run the risk of missing their connexion. This ticket office is 
now closed. ‘There is a station at the end of each section of the narrative, and 
the connexions are not guaranteed.” 'he Quest of the Historical Jesus, pp. 331 f. 


9 


10 THE SYNOPTIC JESUS [1 


of contemporary religion which to many of our age are 
unintelligible and repellent. 

It is thus impossible to begin our study of the Doctrine 
of Christ’s Person with an account of the Jesus of the 
Gospels which can claim to be the proved result of New 
Testament scholarship. Recent research has done much 
to illuminate the Jewish background of the life of Jesus, 
and historical criticism has, in part, sifted out the docu- 
ments, and enabled us better to judge the value of our | 
sources, but the real problems still remain, and they are 
problems which the most erudite scholarship is still unable 
to settle. Any account of the Jesus of the Gospels has 
to be “scientific ’’ in the sense of giving due heed to all 
the data, but the wide divergency among modern pictures 
of Jesus is itself sufficient to show that no picture of Him 
is ‘‘scientific’’ alone. Beyond the fact that He lived, 
was crucified, and was believed by His disciples to have 
risen, there is scarcely any statement which can be made 
about Him which has not been questioned bysome scholar 
of distinction. 

We need not unduly deplore the failure of modern 
scholarship to reach any consentient view of the nature 
of Jesus’ work and person. An acknowledged failure is 
better than a fictitious success. If, instead of failure, 
there had been genuine success, the problem would not 
be solved.’ The most that scholarship can ever do is to 
put us back into Jesus’ age, and let us see Him as men saw 
Him then. Even if that were done, we should still have 
to answer the question of Jesus for ourselves. Whose Jesus 
would we see? The Gospels present to us not only the 
Jesus who healed the sick, and blessed the children, and 
won for Himself the perplexed faith of His disciples. They 
show us also the Jesus of the ‘“‘ average man,” a prophet 
possibly, but one whom it was not wise to trust too far, 
and the Jesus of His influential enemies, a blasphemer 
and perverter of true religion, who must at any cost be 


1] THE KINGDOM OF GOD ll 


killed. And Jesus still divides men as one who belongs, not to 
the past alone, but to the present. He forces men’s choice ; 
wins from them their faith, their patronage, their indiffer- 
ence, or their hostility; and the question ‘‘ Who say ye 
that I am?” is still a question which no man can answer 
for another. 

Interesting as it is to seek to know how men judged of 
this historic Jesus and how they judge of Him to-day, it 
is of far greater importance to learn how Jesus Himself 
judged of His person. The days are happily gone when 
that problem could be discussed in terms of “ the claims 
of Christ.’’ It is not only that the titles of dignity He used 
or accepted—Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God—are of 
doubtful meaning. The phrase itself is misleading, and 
even offensive. Jesus was not concerned to make “ claims ”’ 
for Himself. It was God and God’s Kingdom that He 
preached. The Gospels have preserved for us a few intense 
utterances which give us passing glimpses into the mystery 
of His inner life. But neither knowledge nor imagination 
can pierce the secret of His soul. We have to pass from the 
‘outer to the inner, and try to form some idea of how He 
judged His place and person from the total impress of 
His work and mission. 


His work’and mission find summary expression in the 
phrase ‘‘ Kingdom of God”’ or ‘“‘ of Heaven.” St. Mark 
tells us that it was with the proclamation of the Kingdom 
that Jesus began His public ministry, ‘“‘ The Time is fulfilled 
and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent ye and believe 
in the good news.’’! There seems to be no evidence for the 
use of the phrase in pre-Christian Judaism,? but the phrase 
would have been readily intelligible to our Lord’s hearers, 
and would have been interpreted through the rich and 


1 Mark i. 15. 
* Jackson and Lake, 7'he Beginnings of Christianily, I. 1, pp. 269 f. 


12 THE SYNOPTIC JESUS [x 


complex aspirations of contemporary Judaism. All devout 
Jews believed in the Sovereignty of God, but they differed 
much as to how that Sovereignty was to be manifested. 
Just as to-day some Christians feed their souls chiefly on 
the Psalms, others on the Synoptic Gospels, others on the 
writings of Paul or John, and others on the Book of Revela- 
tion, so in the Judaism of that time there was much diversity 
of religious emphasis and experience. There were Jews 
who found in the Law their pride and joy; others won 
from the Prophets and the Psalmists their confidence that 
God would deliver Israel from their oppressors.1 Nor was 
it from the Old Testament alone that religious faith was 
enkindled. There were new and influential developments, 
but these too lacked unity. Thus in the Psalms of Solomon, 
that beautiful expression of Pharisaic piety, there is 
depicted the eager expectation of a Davidic king who 
‘should purge Jerusalem and make it holy, even as it was 
in the days of old.” ‘‘ And there shall be no iniquity in 
his days in their midst for all shall be holy and their king 
the Lord Messiah.’”’? The first part of the Book of Enoch 
portrays the splendours of the Good Time coming, but 
makes no reference to a Messianic King. The second part, 
the Similitudes of Enoch,? connects the coming of the 
Kingdom with the glorious appearance of the Son of Man, 
who shall execute the terrible judgements of God, and 
become ‘“‘the hope of those who are troubled of 
heart.’’4 

It seems impossible then to explain by any one phase 
of Judaism how our Lord’s use of the term Kingdom of God 
would have been interpreted by His hearers. We have 
to try as best we may to learn its meaning from the record 

* Cp. the Magnificat and the Benedictus, Luke i. 46-55, 68-79. 

2 From Ps. xvii. For a discussion of the term “‘ Lord Messiah,” see Abrahams’ 
Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, I., pp. 136-8. As Dr. Abrahams points 
out, there seems no reason to doubt the J ewish provenance of the passage. 

? Found in Chapt. XXXVII-LXXI. 


4 XLVIII., 4. Translations are from Dr. Charles’ Oxford Edition of the Pseu- 
depigrapha. 


1] THE KINGDOM OF GOD 13 


of His words. Here we are confronted at once with the diffi- 
culty which troubles to-day all students of the Gospels, 
except those who have the happy gift of being able to see 
only one side of a very complex problem. 

The Church owes an immeasurable debt to those who 
in the latter part of the nineteenth century rediscovered 
the Kingdom of God in our Lord’s teaching, and made it 
once more current coin. For the most part, they saw in 
the phrase a meaning which was at once congenial and 
intelligible to modern men. It was the realm in which 
God is trusted as Father, and obeyed as King, and those 
parables were emphasised which seem to speak of its gradual 
extension through the slow but certain victory of those 
religious and ethical ideals expressed in our Lord’s gracious 
message of the Fatherhood of God, and the infinite worth 
to Him of every human soul. Such a teaching not only 
harmonised with the modern belief in the sure progress of 
the race, due to the upward trend of evolution. It brought 
a new sense of the value of Christianity to many who had 
grown weary of the excessive individualism and other- 
worldliness of an earlier orthodoxy, and were concerned 
to assert the reign of God in every sphere of life. 

To-day this interpretation is very confidently rejected 
by some of our most distinguished scholars. Jesus, they 
remind us, belonged to His age, not ours. The Kingdom 
of God, as He preached it, cannot be modernised. It is 
an idea derived from the apocalyptic! hopes of contem- 
porary Judaism. The Kingdom of God is purely super- 
natural, unconditioned by men’s efforts, a Kingdom to be 
perfected, not by the spread of Christianity, or by the slow 
progress of the race, but by God’s sole and catastrophic 

1 The writings which embody these hopes are called “ apocalyptic ” because they 
profess to give an “ apocalypse,” an “ unveiling’ of coming events, or ‘‘ eschato- 
logical ’’ because they deal with “‘ the last things,” the end of the present age. A 
full account of these writings is given in Charles, Hschatology, Hebrew, Jewish and 
Christian. There is an admirable brief summary of their teaching in Leckie, The 


World to Come and Final Destiny. For a short account of the “liberal” and 
** eschatological ” interpretation of Jesus, see later, Chap. VIII, pp. 201-6. 


14 THE SYNOPTIC JESUS [x 


act, which Jesus expected would take place in the lifetime 
of His hearers. 

The controversy has not yet closed. It raises problems 
too fundamental to be evaded, but there is as yet no sign 
of any simple or complete solution. It has brought for- 
gotten aspects of truth into new prominence, and made 
impossible any facile modernisation of our Lord’s teaching. 
It seems already clear that the Kingdom, as Jesus taught 
it, cannot be identified with a devout philanthropy. It — 
was God, not man, which dominated His thought, and 
His faith in the future sprang, not from the nobility of man, 
nor from the evolutionary process, but from His faith in 
the transcendent majesty and love of God. In an essay 
written some years before the war, Prof. Burkitt pointed 
out ‘“‘the enormous difference between the early Christian 
outlook upon the world and that which is prevalent in our 
own time.” ‘‘ At the back and foundation of our own 
beliefs is entrenched the conviction that ours is a stable 
order, that the present state of things is going more or less 
to continue ”’ whilst ‘“‘ the Gospels were written in times 
and circumstances when the civilisation men saw around 
them was not stable, and when men’s immediate duties 
were the duties of those who live in an unstable civilisa- 
tion.’’! It was in God and not in the progress of a “‘ stable 
civilisation ’’ that Jesus trusted, and now that our civilisation 
seems less stable than it did, this message should be a little 
easier for us to understand. 

For all the graciousness of those parables which we 
modern men most delight to remember, nowhere does 
Jesus speak as if God’s love was something obvious and 
to be assumed. He retained to the full the prophetic 
emphasis on God’s sublimity and holiness, and expected 
that men would fear God? as well as trust Him. To define 
the Kingdom as the sphere in which God is trusted as 
Father and obeyed as King may be true in fact, but it is 


1 Cambridge Biblical Essays, pp. 208, 213, 2 Matt. x. 28; Luke xii. 5. 


1] THE KINGDOM OF GOD 15 


false in emphasis. With Jesus it was not man’s faith that 
is primary, but God’s grace. As Titius pointed out long 
ago, “‘The Kingdom means not that we believe in God, 
but that God’ manifests Himself to us; not that we call 
upon God with a childlike heart, but that He recognises us 
as His children, and honours us with the name of sons.’’! 
The Kingdom was God’s gift, and was possible only through 
God’s power. That power was infinite. With God all 
things are possible. 

It would seem that we have in our Lord’s realisation 
of God’s power, not only the source of His confidence, 
but the explanation of His early hope that the Kingdom 
would soon be consummated. The powers of “the age 
to come ”’ were already manifest on earth. His works of 
healing were the signs that the “last days ’’ had dawned.? 
For these powers to become widely operative, the faith 
of men was necessary, but the faith demanded was not a 
complete faith, and so a faith beyond men’s reach. Faith, 
small as a “grain of mustard seed,” would be sufficient 
to enable His disciples to utilise the transcendent forces 
of the Kingdom.? 

It seems impossible then to accept the over-modernised 
conception of the Kingdom current a generation ago, and 
expounded with much grace and charm in books like 
Harnack’s What is Christianity ? and Wendt’s Teaching 
of Jesus. Such a conception ignored essential elements 
of our Lord’s teaching, and involved the total excision of 
those passages in the Gospels which appear to connect 
His proclamation of the Kingdom with the apocalyptic 
fancies of Hisage. The excision of the apocalyptic passages 
was not without some justification. The Synoptic Gospels 


1 Jesu Lehre vom Reiche Gottes, p. 104. Titius quotes in illustration, Matt. v. 


» 9. 
* Cp. Jesus’ answer to the messengers of John the Baptist. Matt. xi. 4-6; 
Luke vii. 22, 23. 
* Matt. xvii. 20; Luke xvii, 6, Cp. the very suggestive discussion in Hogg, 
Redemption from the World. 


16 THE SYNOPTIC JESUS [x 


date from a time when the Church still looked forward 
with eager expectation to our Lord’s return, and the theory 
that their writers intensified the apocalyptic references 
in our Lord’s words, or even introduced them, is not an 
impossible one, and is still accepted by some recent writers.? 
We may hold that this theory does undue violence to our 
sources, but, because we hold one extreme to be wrong, 
it does not follow that we must believe that the other 
extreme is right. It is hard to see that we are likely to 
come any nearer to the whole truth if, in order to emphasise 
those elements in the Gospel records which are least 
intelligible to us to-day, we ignore those elements which 
are certainly integral to our Lord’s teaching, for they 
could not possibly have been invented by evangelists who 
themselves shared in the fervid hope that swiftly and 
suddenly Christ would manifest Himself with splendour 
and with power. 

This is just what is done by some of tlie more extreme 


1 E.g. Mr. Emmet, who in Part III of The Lord of Thought sought to give a 
“ Critical Verification ’’ of a view of Jesus and His mission which rejects entirely the 
“ eschatological” interpretation. See especially pp. 282 ff. where he seeks to show 
that ‘“‘ a simple and non-eschatological saying,” reported in Matt. x. 32, 33 and Luke 
xii. 8, 9, receives ‘‘a Marcan and Lucan version where it is connected with the 
Coming of the Son of Man” (Mark viii. 38, Luke ix. 26), and “‘ a developed eschato- 
logical version” in Matt. xvi. 27. In the sequel to these last passages, Mark ix. 1 
has “see the Kingdom of God come with power.” ‘Here, though the wording is 
vaguely apocalyptic, the reference might be to the visible triumph of Christ and 
the cause for which He stood, however brought about. This applies still more 
strongly to Luke’s ‘ see the Kingdom of God’ (Luke ix. 27). But Matthew makes 
it refer definitely to a visible coming, ‘ till they see the Son of Man coming in His 
Kingdom.’ Once more we can trace the process by which an eschatological 
element was introduced.” So cautious a critic as Dr. Headlam remarks of the 
“alteration” in Matthew’s version that it “‘ suggests that there was a tendency to 
modify the words of our Lord in an eschatological sense ” (The Life and Teaching of 
Jesus the Christ, p. 260). It is significant that it is only in Matthew that we get the 
saying, “ Ye shall not have gone through the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be 
come,” Matt. x. 23, which Schweitzer takes to mean that Jesus tells His disciples, 
“in plain words that He does not expect to see them back in the present age. The 
Parousia of the Son of Man, which is logically and temporally identical with the 
dawn of the Kingdom, will take place before they shall have completed a hasty 
journey through the cities of Israel to announce it” (The Quest of the Historical 
Jesus, p. 357). For the grave critical difficulties in Schweitzer’s ‘‘ assumption that 
Matt. x. is word for word what was said at the time,” see Streeter, The Four Gospels, 
pp. 255, 263, and for the enhancement of the Apocalyptic element in Matthew, 
pp. 516-23. 


1] THE KINGDOM OF GOD 17 


representatives of the eschatological interpretation of Jesus. 
Thus in the first and most pointed manifesto of this school, 
Johannes Weiss’ little book on The Preaching of Jesus on 
the Kingdom of God, we look in vain for any adequate 
recognition of the infinite graciousness of some of our 
Lord’s parables, and of His proclamation of God’s individual 
and untiring love. Instead, we are asked to believe that 
Jesus thought of the Kingdom as something purely super- 
natural, which could not increase, or be perfected, but 
could only come through God’s catastrophic act and must 
come speedily, because in the upper world Satan was 
already overthrown.! Such a theory petrifies into dogma 
the shifting phantasies of Jewish Apocalypse, and then 
interprets Jesus’ mission through this apocalyptic dogma, 
which is modern and German, not ancient and Jewish, in 
its consistency.” It is the theory which is elaborated in 
Schweitzer’s famous book and from which he will allow 
no concession. ? 

Johannes Weiss himself corrected in part the onesidedness 
of the first edition of his book, and admitted that it is 
“psychologically conceivable that the agitation of soul 
from which the judgement preaching of Jesus arose was 
removed in time through a quieter mood.” ‘“ Not in 
every moment was the thundery sultriness of that catas- 
trophic time felt with equal strength. The strain relaxes 
and the pressure becomes less of that violent message which 
was laid upon His soul.” “The thought of the downfall 
of the world recedes,’ and ‘‘ He gives Himself to the 


1 Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, 1892, pp. 49, 18. 

2 So Dr. Leckie complains of the extreme eschatological theory, ‘‘ The root of its 
misfortunes is that it starts from an unhistorical basis. The Jewish expectation of 
the Kingdom was not defined and uniform, but vague and many-sided and chang- 
ing. Also the imagery in which it was expressed was not harmonious in form and 
colour, but diverse and discordant. When we forget these things we attribute to 
Apocalypse a logical cohesion that is foreign to its genius—that is not ancient but 
modern, not Jewish but German. And the result is that we reap a harvest of 
amazement; and achieve a portrait of Jesus that is not recognisable, either by 
history or by faith,” op. cit., p. 43. 

* The Quest of the Historical Jesus, pp. 328-401. 


B 


18 THE SYNOPTIC JESUS [x 


things of this life, rejoices with the glad, mourns with those 
that weep. This is no longer the gloomy and stern prophet, 
but a man among men, a child of God among the children 
of men.” ‘‘ From such moods were born those words and 
parables,”’ ‘in which there is little trace of world-weariness 
and asceticism, or of the end of the world and judgement.’’? 
In this beautiful but elusive book we have thus a recognition 
that there were elements in Jesus’ teaching which the 
extreme eschatological view is inadequate to explain. | 

The concession seems inadequate. Our Gospels do not 
suggest that Jesus entered on His ministry as a “‘ gloomy 
and stern prophet.’”’ His message was the Gospel, the 
“Good News” of God.2, When at Nazareth He outlined 
His mission, He referred not to dread portents and stern 
judgements, but to the proclamation of good news to the 
poor, deliverance for the bound, sight for the blind, and 
liberty for them that are bruised, the acceptable year 
of the Lord? and, as we have seen, it was by such works 
that He bade the messengers of John the Baptist judge 
of His vocation. It seems impossible to eliminate the 
apocalyptic elements from the record of our Lord’s words. 
Their fervid symbols expressed, as nothing else could do, 
His sense of God’s utter power, and His conception of the 
Kingdom as the emergence into the seen of the powers 
of the unseen world, but, in view of such passages as these, 
it seems as impossible to suppose that His doctrine of the 
Kingdom is just a transcript of apocalyptic thought. 

There is a sense in which all Christian ethics is an 
Interimsethik, “‘ the special ethic of the interval before the 
coming of the Kingdom,” for it demands perfection from 
men who are living in a world-order as yet imperfect. 
But that is not what the extreme eschatologists mean by 
the phrase. It is strange that if Jesus, in their sense, 


* Op. cit., 2nd edit. (1900), pp. 135 ff. ? Mark i, 14, 15. 
* Luke iv. 18, 19. It is significant that He broke off where He did, and did not 
quote the next sentence from Isa, lxi. which deals with God’s day of vengeance. 


T] JESUS AND THE KINGDOM 19 


propounded only an ‘“‘ Ethic of the Interim,” that His 
commands should have taken the form they did. He did 
not say, “‘ Lay not up for yourselves treasure on earth nor 
be anxious about food or drink because the end is near,” 
but, because where men’s treasure is, their heart is also, 
and because over-anxiety is distrust in God, a failure to 
believe that the Heavenly Father knows His children’s 
needs. Nor does He say “‘ Be perfect because the dreadful 
judgement of the world is near,” but ‘‘ be perfect because the 
Father is perfect,’’ and His children must be even as He is. 

Schweitzer connects this “‘ Ethic of the Interim ’”’ with 
the predestinarian view of God’s relation with men which 
he claims to find in Jesus’ teaching.? That surely is not 
the general impress of our Lord’s revelation of God. He 
speaks of God, not as a despot, planning vengeance on 
all save the elect, but as the Father, stern indeed with 
love’s sternness, but of ineffable grace, seeking out the 
lost, like a shepherd seeking the sheep which is His own, 
or like a father welcoming from afar his profligate son, and 
not reproaching him with his guilt and folly, but gladly 
giving him a forgiveness which springs, not from the son’s 
merit, but from the father’s love. The purely eschatological 
interpretation of the Kingdom thus appears to be at least 
as arbitrary and one-sided as the over-modernised inter- 
pretation which it claims to have displaced. Jesus’ pro- 
clamation of the Kingdom cannot be compressed into the 
narrow limits of this so-called ‘‘dogma”’ of Jewish 
- Apocalypse. 


It was God and God’s Kingdom that Jesus preached, 
but with that Kingdom He was inseparably connected, 
and in His proclamation of the Kingdom is revealed His 
conception of His own place and person. 


1 Matt. vi. 19, 21 and 31, 32, and v. 48. 
2 The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 352. 


20 THE SYNOPTIC JESUS {1 


The question has often been discussed whether Jesus 
regarded Himself first as the Son or the Messiah. Such 
a question seems irrelevant. It is not only, as was long 
ago pointed out, that “‘the abstract distinction of these 
two ideas is modern, and does not correspond with the 
consciousness of Jesus,”! There is a deeper reason. / With 
Him, as with no other man, vocation and personality were 
inextricably united. His personality was determined by 
His filial relationship to God, and that personality found 
expression in His vocation, His work as the Messiah, the 
founder of God’s Kingdom. 

Our records suggest that it was at His baptism by 
John that there came to Him a new and vivid sense of 
His unique relation with the Father, and the voice which 
He then heard spoke of Him not only as the Son, but as 
the ‘‘ Beloved,’ the Messiah.2. The narrative of the 
Temptation follows at once with psychological appropriate- 
ness. 

As Son, He was to found the Kingdom, to be the Messiah 
of Jewish hope. How was that work to be accomplished ? 
Was He to use His powers spectacularly, and dazzle men 
into the recognition of His claims? Should He seek “all 
the kingdoms of the earth,’ be a ‘‘ Warrior Christ,” 
‘“‘a Cesar on the throne of David, albeit ruling, when He 
got there, in the spirit of righteousness’? If not, was the 
Kingdom to come by God’s sole act, as the apocalyptic 
writers pictured. If so, “ should He by some startling act 
precipitate its consummation? The Son of Man was 
expected to appear in the sky with attendant angels. 
Should He then fling Himself from the highest pinnacle 
of the Temple in sight of all Jerusalem, trusting that God, 
to save His Christ from destruction, would send a flight 
of angels to His support ?”’? Notso. In trust in God would 


1 Baldensperger, Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu im Lichte der Messianischen Hoff- 
nungen seiner Zeit*, p, 222. 

* Mark i. 11 (Matt. iii. 17, Luke iii, 22), ep. Isa. xlii. 1. 

* Streeter in Foundations, p. 101. 


1] JESUS AND THE KINGDOM 21 


He live ; God alone would He worship, and God He would 
not tempt. 

Thus Jesus stood in inseparable connexion with the 
Kingdom. He was the Son whose work it was to found 
the Kingdom. To His authority the Gospels bear abundant 
witness. To suffer for Him was to suffer for righteousness’ 
sake.t With unquestioning confidence, He revised the 
Jewish law which men held to be the very word of God.? 
He spoke as if on men’s attitude to Him would depend 
their eternal destiny. At the judgement day, many would 
say to Him, ‘Lord, Lord.” Useless would it be if He 
knew them not.? He demanded from men the severest 
sacrifices. They must put loyalty to Him before the 
nearest bonds of kith and kin. Yet He called His message 
“good news’ and spoke as if to His disciples had come 
a blessedness which the prophets and just men of the past 
had sought in vain. 

It seems impossible then to suppose that Jesus regarded 
Himself merely as the forerunner of the Kingdom. In 
one sense the Kingdom still lay in the future, for the 
present world-order still ruled, yet “‘ the future salvation 
had become present, without ceasing to be future.’® 
His disciples could rejoice, for the ‘‘ Bridegroom ”’ was 
with them.® His victory over the demons was a sign 
of the irruption into this world-order of the heavenly 
Kingdom.’ Already He had seen Satan fall like lightning 
from heaven.® Jesus’ gracious deeds of healing were the 
proof of His Messianic power. Thus in Him the future 
Kingdom was already present. There was no need to seek 
for the strange portents which were expected to precede 


1 Matt. v. 10, 11. * Matt. v. 27-48. 

* Matt. vii. 21-3. It is interesting to notice that these verses form part of the 
“simple” Sermon on the Mount, whose freedom from all taint of ‘ dogma ’”’ has 
been so often held up for our admiration. Cp. the still stronger statement in Matt. 
x. 32, 33 (=Luke xii. 8). 

4 Matt. xiii. 16, 17, Luke x. 23, 24. 

5 Julius Kaftan, Jesus und Paulus, p. 24. * Matt. ix. 15, Mark ii, 19. 

7 Matt. xii. 28, Luke xi. 20. ® Luke x. 18. 


22 THE SYNOPTIC JESUS [1 


and usher in the Kingdom’s coming.t The Kingdom 
would not come by observation. Already the future 
Kingdom was in men’s midst for He was there.? 

The Messianic consciousness of Jesus was thus the 
expression of His unique filial relationship with God. 
True man, He lived in dependence upon God and prayed 
to Him, not as some later Christians believed, to set His 
disciples an example, but because such prayer was a 
necessity of His own life. Yet there was a difference. He 
bade the disciples pray ‘‘ Our Father.’’ He Himself spoke 
of ““My Father” and ‘your Father.’’? No record of 
Jesus’ words is as certain as that given us in the Parables, 
for they, at least, are beyond the Evangelists’ invention ; 
and in the Parable of the Vineyard, whereas the prophets 
are God’s servants, He is the Son.4 Yet it would appear 
that He rarely referred to His own Sonship. That was 
natural, for it was the Father, not Himself, that He was 
concerned to preach. As we have seen, the term occurs 
in the passage in which He declared His ignorance of the 
time of the Consummation. ‘Of that day and hour 
knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither 
the Son, but the Father only.”> Of supreme importance 
is the passage in which Jesus, in a moment of exaltation, 
gives us a glimpse of His own inner life, and unveils to us 

1 Such portents are indeed referred to in Matt. xxiv., Mark xiii., Luke xxi., where 
many modern scholars still hold (e.g. Moffatt, Introduction to the Literature of the 
New Testament, pp. 207 ff.; Streeter, The Four Gospels, pp. 491-4) that there is 
interpolated into the Gospels a “ little Apocalypse ” (Mark xiii. 7, 8, 14-20, 24-7, 
Matt. xxiv. 6-8, 15-22, 29-31, Luke xxi. 9-11, 20-4, 25-8). Whether this be so or 
not, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that words of Jesus, uttered in reply 
to the question put to Him privately by some of His disciples, which bade them 
look to themselves and their own peril, and warned them that “‘ of that hour” not 
even the Son knew, have been assimilated to the intense apocalyptic hopes of the 
early Church, so that portents are mentioned which, as being clear signs of the 
imminence of the Parousia, would remove the necessity for the very watchfulness 
enjoined. See the lucid discussion by Dr. Vernon Bartlet, St. Mark, pp. 364-9. 

? If, as is possible, €vrds tua, should be translated ‘‘ within you,” the saying 
would still more clearly show that Jesus held that the Kingdom was already present. 
_ * There is a good discussion on the question, “ Did Jesus pray with His disciples ?” 
in Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience, pp. 472-81. 


* Matt. xxi. 37, Mark xii. 6, Luke xx. 13. 
5 Matt. xxiv. 36, Mark xiii. 32. 


1] JESUS AND THE KINGDOM 23 


His sense of His unique relationship with God and His 
unique place in the revelation of God to man. In both 
Matthew and Luke, it is given as a sequel to His exultant 
praise to God for revealing the mystery of the Kingdom 
to disciples who were but simple and untutored folk. ‘ All 
things have been delivered unto Me, of My Father: and 
no man knoweth the Son, save the Father ; neither doth 
any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever 
the Son willeth to reveal Him.”’! These words indeed are 
“not a claim to universal dominion, but a confession 
of entire dependence’’*; but they express our Lord’s 
realisation that He knew God as Father with a knowledge 
which being perfect was unique. No man had known God 
as He knew Him, and so only in Him could God be fully 
known. So, in this colossal consciousness of Sonship, He 
could bid men toiling and overburdened come to Him to 
find rest for their souls, a yoke that was gentle, and a 
burden that was light.° 

Wrede has advanced the theory that Jesus was not in 
His lifetime recognised by any as the Messiah, and Wrede 
evidently believed that Jesus made for Himself no such 
claim.* Such a theory not only requires us to suppose 
that Mark deliberately interpolated into the history of the 
life of Jesus the Messiah-secret, and thus makes of his 
Gospel], not an honest record of fact, but a work of fiction. 
We would also have to believe that the disciples somehow 
began to think of Jesus as the Messiah only after He had 
died the very death which was to Jews the signal proof 
that He had been accursed of God.® That surely is in- 
credible. But the perverse theories of brilliant men have 


1 Matt. xi. 27, Luke x. 22. Drs. Jackson and Lake remark of this verse that 
“it is very improbable that it is an accurate representation of the mind of Jesus, 
or of the earliest Christian thought,” The Beginnings of Christianity, I. 1, p. 396. 
It is certainly incongruous with the presentation of the message of Jesus these 
scholars give, but may it not be that that incongruity is due, not to the tradition 
being spurious, but to their representation being inadequate ? 

» Garvie, Studies tn the Inner Life of Jesus, p. 311. * Matt. xi. 28-30. 

* Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien. * Cp. Deut, xxi, 23 and Gal, iii, 13, 


24 THE SYNOPTIC JESUS [z 


usually something to teach, and Wrede’s theory has served 
to bring into fresh prominence the great reserve with 
which Jesus spoke of His Messiahship. The term denoted 
for many, ideas alien from His mission. To have announced 
Himself as the Messiah would have aroused a spurious 
enthusiasm due to a misconception of His meaning. 
Instead, He did what no one would have expected the 
Messiah to do; He gathered a few disciples around Him, 
that they might discover for themselves that He was the. 
Messiah, but a Messiah in a quite different sense from any 
of their dreams. The crown of thorns with which the 
soldiers mocked Him, and the inscription on the Cross, 
“The King of the Jews,’’ seem to show that by the time 
of His trial, at least, others than His disciples believed 
that He claimed to be the Messiah. Yet, when challenged 
by the High Priest to say if He was the Messiah, if we 
follow Matthew and Luke’s account, Jesus, though He 
did not deny the claim, gave only a guarded assent,! and 
when Pilate demanded if He was the King of the Jews, 
Jesus answered with the same reserve.2 Just as the 
Kingdom of God He preached, though connected with the 
Age to Come of Jewish Apocalypse, could not be identified 
with it, so His Messiahship, though an answer to the 
Messianic hopes of His people, yet differed from them. 
It was a Messiahship to be interpreted primarily, not 
through apocalyptic fancies, but through His filial con- 
sciousness of God, and His conception of the work which 
God had given Him to do. 


It may well be that our Lord’s use of the term Son of 


1 The second person pronoun of Matthew’s, Thou hast said (Matt. xxvi. 64), and 
Luke’s, Ye say that I am (Luke xxii. 70), isemphatic. As Dr. Peake puts it, it is as 
if He said, “‘ 1t is you who employ the term: I should not have used it myself, but 
I admit that it is correct,” The Messiah and the Son of Man, p. 12. Cp. Abrahams, 
Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, II., pp. 1-3. 

* Matt. xxvii. 11, Mark xv. 2, Luke xxiii, 3. 


1] THE SON OF MAN 25 


Man is itself an indication of the way He suggested, rather 
than stated, His Messianic place. 

The origin of the phrase is still uncertain. In the Old 
Testament it is simply a poetic periphrasis for ‘‘ man.’’4 
Even in the famous passage in Daniel vii., ‘‘son of man” 
means merely ‘“‘man,’’ and represents, not the Messiah, 
but the redeemed community. The four pagan empires 
are symbolised by “‘ beasts”’; the glorified Israel by one 
in human form.? In the Similitudes of Enoch, the phrase 
‘Son of Man ”’ has come to denote a specific and mysterious 
Man, the Elect of God, who “sitting upon the throne of 
His glory, should cause”’ sinners to pass away, and be 
destroyed from off the face of the earth, and “all evil 
to pass away before his face.”? The phrase Son of Man 
is used in the Gospels not of Jesus, but by Him. Probably 
His use of the phrase is connected with its use in Jewish 
Apocalypse. If so, we are confronted at once with the 
paradox of Jesus’ place and mission—the strange union 
of dignity and lowliness, of majesty and suffering. 

As we study the passages in which the term Son of Man 
is used, we find that, although in some neutral contexts 
it may mean little more than “‘I,’’* in general, the passages 
fall into two clearly marked divisions. In the first, it is 
the Messianic glory that is prominent. The Son of Man 
has authority to forgive sin,® and so exercised on earth 
the function of God Himself. The Son of Man would rise 
again,® would return to earth in splendour,’ and would 


1 E.g. Ps, viii. 4. 2 Dan. vii. 1-14, 

* Enoch lxix. 27-9. Cp. the grim picture of Chap. lxii. In iv Ezra which is 
contemporary with, or a little later than, the Synoptic Gospels, there is the vision 
of the Man, who flew with the clouds of heaven and smote and destroyed the great 
multitude of his enemies, “‘ by the fiery stream ” from his mouth, “a flaming breath ” 
out of his lips and a “ storm of sparks ” out of his tongue (xiii. 1-56), 

4 The statement often confidently made that the Aramaic equivalent of Son of 
Man (Barnasha) could only mean “ man”’ is not accepted by all Aramaic specialists, 
Even if that were so, it must have been possible to denote not merely man but “ the 
Man,” the mysterious Man of apocalyptic hopes, and the attempt to eliminate the 
phrase altogether from the Gospels creates more problems than it solves, 

5 Matt. ix. 6, Mark ii. 10, Luke v. 24. 

* Matt. xvii. 9, Mark ix. 9 (cp. Luke xxiv. 6, 7). 

? Matt. xvi. 28, xix. 28, xxv. 31, xxvi. 64 (=Mark xiv. 62, Luke xxii. 69). 


26 THE SYNOPTIC JESUS [1 


be the judge of men.! These passages seem to express 
the Messianic consciousness of Jesus in the symbols of 
Jewish apocalyptic hope. But there is another element, 
unrelated to contemporary aspiration, and original to 
Jesus—the element expressed in the second division of 
passages which speak of His humiliation, suffering and death. 
It appears from our records that it was only after Peter 
had confessed Him to be Messiah that Jesus explicitly 
taught his disciples the necessity of His death. Yet it. 
would appear that the possibility that His earthly life 
would end in a cruel death was with Him from the beginning 
of His public ministry. The acceptance of His vocation 
was followed by a period of acute temptation, and, as we 
have seen, these temptations came from the consciousness 
that He was the Messiah, and were concerned with the 
method by which His Messianic work was to be accom- 
plished. Those temptations were rejected.2. He would 
not use His powers to secure by external means a facile 
success. But if He refused to use such means, how could 
He be sure that the people would accept His message ?° 
Quite early in His ministry we find Him speaking of a 


1 Luke xii. 8 (cp. Matt. x. 32), Matt. xvi. 27 (=Mark viii. 38, Luke ix. 26), Matt. 
xii, 41. 

* Schweitzer holds that Jesus’ determination to die “‘ was due to the non- 
fulfilment of the promises made in the discourse at the sending forth of the Twelve.” 
‘* By sending forth the disciples with their message He hurled the firebrand which 
should kindle the fiery trials of the Last Time,” but “ the flame went out.” So 
Jesus concluded that He must give His life a ransom for those (and only for those) 
whom God had predestinated to the Kingdom, and went up to Jerusalem to force 
His death and so secure the Parousia which Schweitzer apparently believes that 
Jesus held would synchronise with His resurrection on the third day (op. cit., pp. 387, © 
388 and 385). Schweitzer describes this identification of ‘“‘ His condemnation and 
execution, which are to take place on natural lines, with the predicted pre-Messianic 
tribulations ”’ as an “‘ imperious forcing of eschatology into history.” Butis not this 
theory an imperious forcing of the Gospel history into the narrow bounds of his 
eschatological dogma ? And, on his theory, can we really say that the temptations 
were rejected ? Is there much difference between Jesus’ resolve to die, as Schweitzer 
interprets it, and the temptation to precipitate the Kingdom, by casting Himself 
down from a pinnacle of the temple ? 

* It is probable, as Dr. Garvie suggests, that Jesus disclosed to His disciples the 
story of the Temptations at the time when Peter, having confessed Him to be the 
Messiah, expostulated with Him for referring to His death (Studies in the Inner Life 
of Jesus, p. 129), 


‘ 


T] THE SON OF MAN 27 


time when the Bridegroom would be taken away.! Yet 
it would seem that, at first, although He knew there was 
the possibility of His rejection, He cherished the glad hope 
that the people would show faith enough for God to be 
able to do for them His work of grace. But instead, the 
‘“‘aeceptable year of the Lord ”’ proved to be a time when 
evil was still triumphant. The people’s unfaith made 
impossible the full irruption on earth of the supernatural 
powers of God’s Kingdom. It was for Him to do the Father’s 
will, and the fulfilment of that will was conditioned by 
human response. He had “‘ come to seek and to save that 
which was lost.” The God whom He proclaimed was not 
the grim God of Apocalypse, executing vengeance upon 
all but the elect. He was the God who “seeks until He 
finds,’ the God whom Jesus had depicted as the Father 
rejoicing over the profligate’s return. When the possibility 
of His rejection became a certainty, He knew that He 
must go to Jerusalem to die, and saw in His death and 
resurrection the consummation of, His work for God. 

We have here the complete transformation by Jesus 
of that Messianic hope to which He related His vocation. 
The great prophet of the Exile had, indeed, spoken of one 
. “despised and rejected of men,’’ wounded for the trans- 
gressions and bruised for the iniquities of his people, one 
who should “ bear the sin of many, and make intercession 
for the transgressors.”’ But this conception had never been 
associated with the Messiah, and was, moreover, in violent 
contradiction to the expectation of the Messiah’s splendour. 
Jesus was the Son of Man, the glorious figure of apocalyptic 
hopes, and yet how strange His majesty. He came not 
to be ministered unto, but to minister; not to destroy 
all save the elect, but to win men back to God: “to give 
His life a ransom for many.”* On the eve of His death, 

1 Mark ii. 20, Matt. ix. 15, Luke v. 35. 

* Matt. xx, 28, Mark x. 45. The otherwise mysterious reference to the “‘ many ”’ 


is almost certainly to be explained by the corresponding phrases of Isa. liii., “‘ He 
shall bear the sins of many”; “‘ He shall justify many.” 


28 THE SYNOPTIC JESUS [1 


He spoke, not of failure, nor of His impending agony, but 
of His body broken and His blood outpoured “* for many.”’ 
His death would be the seal of men’s redemption, and the 
means of the establishment of a new covenant between 
God and man. 

Our records do not end with the story of the Cross ; 
could not, indeed, have done, for, apart from the Resur- 
rection, there would have been no Gospel to proclaim. 
Some of those who followed Jesus might still have thought 
of Him as a “ prophet, mighty in deed and word before 
God and all the people,” but even they would have lost 
their hope that it was He ‘‘ who should redeem Israel.’’? 
But He rose again. No account of the Synoptic picture 
of Jesus is complete, or even intelligible, which omits the 
Resurrection. ‘Till then, the disciples’ faith was partial 
and perplexed. Only when He rose from the dead were 
they certain that He was the Messiah, but a Messiah quite 
different from their dreams, a Messiah who. entered into 
His glory through the Cross. 


The Gospels were not written to explain Jesus, nor to 
praise Him. They were written by men who, sharing in 
the Church’s faith that Jesus was their living Lord, sought 
in these brief books to give some picture of His life and 
ministry. They present to us one who was not “ man,” 
but a man, a Jew of a particular age and place, thinking 
in the symbols and categories of His people, and inter- 
preting His mission in relation to Jewish hopes. We cannot 
modernise Him, nor make of Him the genial hero of the 
religious life, the first true believer in God the Father, 
concerned only that His message be believed.. Such 
‘“ Jesusism ”’ is inadequate to the Synoptic picture. It 
fails to explain His use of the mysterious and majestic 
term, the Son of Man, His inseparable connexion with His 


1 Luke xxiv. 19-21. 


1] MAN AND MORE 29 


Kingdom and the importance of His death, which in the 
Gospels is presented, not only as the end, but as the 
consummation of His life. Nor can we, with the more 
extreme of recent ‘ eschatologists,’* see in Him just an 
apocalyptic visionary, who, after dying for a delusion, 
somehow became the strange and unintelligible Lord of 
men. We dare not claim with Weinel that “‘ we know Him 
right well’?! ; but we need not speak of Him as a “ stranger 
and an enigma.’’* An “enigma’’ He is, baffling all our 
explanations, but to many He is not a “stranger.” 
** Messiah,”’ ‘‘ Son of Man ’’—these are transient and local 
terms, hard for men now to understand. Much in Jesus’ 
teaching is obscure. But He remains. The disciples did 
not follow Him because they had grasped the meaning 
of such terms, or understood in full His message. They 
followed Him, in spite of all perplexity, because they felt 
in Him the presence of the Divine, the strange attraction 
and repulsion of the Holy made manifest in His human 
life. Such a discovery is still possible for men to-day, 
for the Gospels have sacramental power; they convey 
Christ, and are thus, not only the product, but the creators 
of Christian faith. 

Little as we know of the historic Jesus, we know enough 
to see in Him one truly man and yet a Man like no other 
men, one perfectly obedient to God’s will, perfectly certain 
of His grace, trusting in Him even in Gethsemane, and on 
the Cross, and revealing God to men, not by what He said 
alone, but by what He did and was. We know His patience 


1 The words which aroused Prof, Burkitt’s scorn, The Quest of the Historical 
Jesus, p. V. 

* Op. cit., p. 397. Prof. E. F. Scott, who will not be accused of lack of candour or 
modernity, comments on Schweitzer’s words, ““ Whatever may have been the limita- 
tions which were imposed on Jesus by the beliefs of His own time, He has never 
been ‘a stranger and an enigma.’ His meaning has been intelligible like that of 
no other teacher, to all races and generations of men.” J'he Kingdom and the 
Messiah, p. 253. 

* Cp. the interesting chapter on Divination in Otto, The Idea of the Holy, E.T., 
pp. 166-78. Such a discovery in Christian lands is usually mediated through the 
Church, but some of the greatest converts from paganism in recent years have made 
this discovery through the Gospels alone, unmediated by Christian men, 


30 THE SYNOPTIC JESUS [1 


with His disciples, His sympathy with the ignorant and 
the suffering, His courage at the trial, His remembrance 
of Peter’s need, His sorrow, even on the way to the Cross, 
at the woes which must befall the daughters of Jerusalem, 
His prayer for those that nailed Him to the Cross, that 
they might be forgiven for they knew not what they did. 
Yet, with it all, there was the dignity of one who knew 
Himself to be in a unique relationship with God, and called 
to do for God a unique work. We cannot abstract His 
message from His person. His proclamation of God and 
God’s Kingdom was inseparably connected with Himself, 
and cannot be understood apart from Him. 

The Synoptic Gospels are not the full and final expression 
of Christianity. They look beyond themselves, for they 
present a Jesus inexplicable by merely human categories, 
whom the writers held to be the Church’s living Lord. 
Who was this Man who thus lived and died and rose again ? 
That was a question it was impossible to evade; and we 
have now to pass from the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels 
to the chief of those classic interpretations of Him which 
form the rest of the New Testament. 


2 The words are omitted by some of the best texts, but, although they may come 
from an extraneous source, are surely genuine. 


II 
SOME NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS 


The Primitive Tradition. 


THE crucial problem in New Testament Christology is the 
relation of the risen, ascended and regnant Christ of 
Apostolic preaching to the historic Jesus of whom the 
first three Gospels speak. That problem can no longer be 
presented as the relation of the Jesus of Paul to the Jesus 
of the Gospels. St. Paul’s Christology is coloured by his 
mystic experiences, and enriched by the speculations of 
his quick, synthetic mind, but the Gospel of a risen Lord 
he preached was no new Gospel. It was a Gospel accepted 
without question by the Church, which had, as its common 
confession, this: that Christ ‘‘died for our sins,” and 
“rose again.”+ One thing at least is clear. If, in the 
early Church, there was a change from the so-called 
*‘ Religion of Jesus”’ to the ‘‘ Gospel of Christ,’’ it was 
not Paul’s work. It was a work accomplished at a time 
when Paul was still a Jewish persecutor. 

Of the history of the Church before St. Paul’s conversion 
we have but scanty knowledge. Yet we do not seem 
entirely without the means of forming some estimate of 
the primitive faith in Jesus. If, as many scholars believe 
to-day, Luke was the author of Acts, then his book is an 
historical document of great credibility and importance.? 
Even if, as others hold, the Book of Acts is late, it would 
still seem probable that the speeches in the early chapters 

1 1 Cor. xv. 1-4. 
? As Sir William Ramsay seems to have proved, 
31 


32 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [xr 


come from a primitive source, and reflect a Christology 
pre-Pauline, or, at least, uninfluenced by St. Paul. 

“Christology ’”’ seems all too formal a term for the 
description of Christ in these early chapters of Acts. 
They express a period, not of theological reflection, but 
of intense religious enthusiasm. Jesus was risen from the 
dead. That to these early disciples was the amazing 
message which meant the reversal of old judgements, and ~ 
the transformation of their Jewish religion. At Cesarea 
Philippi, Peter had confessed Jesus to be the Christ. But, 
later, had come the time when Jesus was rejected by the 
people and crucified. Peter had denied his Master, and 
the hope that Jesus was the Messiah had seemed a pathetic 
dream. Now Jesus was risen. God, by that act, had made 
Him indubitably the Christ, the Messiah. Their Master 
had ascended up into heaven, and from Him had come 
the Holy Spirit, whose power and wonder they daily 
experienced. It seemed to Peter the fulfilment of Joel’s 
prophecy, and the Ascension of Jesus he saw foretold in 
the words assigned to David, ‘‘The Lord said unto my 
Lord, Sit thou on my right hand.’’ The Jesus whom the 
Jews had crucified, God had made “both Lord and 
Christ.”* Eagerly these disciples urged men to repent, 
‘““so that a breathing space may be vouchsafed you, and 
that the Lord may send Jesus your long-decreed Christ, 
who must be kept in heaven till the period of the great 
Restoration.’’? Only in Jesus Christ was there salvation. 
No other name is given under heaven wherein we must be 
saved. It was a confidence which brought to these men 
a joy which not even persecution could destroy. Jesus 
lived. The Son of Man was standing at God’s right hand. 
So Stephen saw Him, and, in his dying moments, prayed, 
Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.® 

1 This, for example, is the view of J. Weiss, who, holding that Acts is subsequent 
to the writings of Josephus, dates it in the late nineties, Urchristentum, pp. 4-7. 


* Acts ii, 14-36, * Acts iii. 20, 21 (Moffatt’s trans. ). 
* Acts iv, 12. 5 Acts vii. 56-60. 


11] THE PRIMITIVE TRADITION 38 


Jesus then, to these men, was not only the Christ ; He 
was the Lord. ‘Lord’ (Kvpios) is a term which has 
become the keyword of much recent controversy. It is 
fashionable to explain the ascription to Jesus of Lordship 
by the use of the term in pagan cults. That is a theory 
which it will be more convenient to discuss in connexion 
with the Christology of St. Paul, for we have there available 
the first-hand evidence of his Epistles. But it is of interest 
to notice the Jewish colouring of these early speeches. 
Jesus is interpreted in terms of Old Testament prophecy 
and Messianic hopes. Peter, a Galilean Jew, calls Jesus 
“Lord ” in connexion with a Davidic Psalm. If, as many 
scholars urge, it was at Antioch, and by Hellenist Christians, 
that Jesus was first called Lord, then the evidence of the 
early chapters of Acts must be rejected. There is no sign 
there of pagan influences. The simpler hypothesis seems 
better to fit the facts: that in the early speeches of Acts 
we have a genuine transcript of primitive Christianity, the 
record of the proclamation of Jesus as Messiah and Lord 
by men who, though Jews, and so monotheists, were yet 
compelled by the fact of the Resurrection, and the experi- 
ence of the Spirit, to assign to their Master a place in the 
very life of God. 

It is customary to speak of the “ Adoptianist Chris- 
tology ” of these first believers. The phrase does not seem 
a happy one. It seems better to describe their doctrine 
as rudimentary and unformed, the immediate expression 
of a religious experience, not yet intellectually explored. 
The Jesus whom some of them had known and loved on 
earth still lived. He was not their dead Master, but their 
regnant Lord. That, for the time, sufficed. This was the 
Gospel they had daily to proclaim. Who was He then ? 


1 The ascription of Lordship to Jesus in the first Jerusalem community is con- 
firmed by the use of that watchword of early Christianity, Maranatha (1 Cor. xvi. 22) 
May the Lord come! which, as an Aramaic word, may be, in spite of Bousset’s 
elaborate argument to the contrary (Kyrios Christos*, pp. 82 ff.), with some con- 
fidence assigned to the Palestinian Christians. 


Cc 


34 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS {11 


How were His place and power to be related to their 
monotheistic faith? What of His pretemporal life ? 
These were problems which, in the amazed enthusiasm of 
those first days, were not unnaturally ignored. 


The Epistles of St. Paul. 


It is a familiar fact of Indian missionary experience that 
a Brahman who becomes a Christian will free himself 
from Hindu presuppositions more decisively than a convert 
of a lower caste. His conversion involves so much that he 
is ready for it to involve all. It is with no surprise then that 
we find that it was St. Paul who first established the 
radical novelty of the Christian Gospel, and, by relating 
to Christianity the religious aspirations of his time, made 
clear the implicates of that faith in Jesus as Lord which 
was the common possession of the early Church. 

A Pharisee, brought up in a strict Jewish home, and 
well versed in Jewish lore, Paul of Tarsus had embraced 
the expectations and hopes of his people with all the 
exile’s passionate loyalty to his race’s heritage. Using 
Aramaic as the language of home and of religion, he yet 
was a Hellenist, speaking the common Greek of the time 
with ease, and writing in it—in a style which was not 
merely translated Aramaic, but the living and apt expres- 
sion of his thoughts. Brought up in a centre of pagan 
culture, this Jew would have had some knowledge of pagan 
thought and practices. A Roman citizen, he could, at his 
conversion, think of Christianity in the context of the 
world’s needs and realise the Church’s task with an 
amplitude of conception impossible for the simple Galileans 
who had been the chief disciples of Jesus in His earthly 
life. 

Of the events which led up to St. Paul’s conversion we 
have only scanty knowledge. Paul the Christian was too 
engrossed with his new Gospel to refer much to his pre- 


Ir] ST. PAUL’S EPISTLES 35 


Christian days. It is natural to suppose that in Romans vii. 
7-25, St. Paul is describing his own poignant experience. 
If so, it would appear that it was the very thoroughness 
with which he sought to be a Jew, which made him in the 
end a Christian. Like Brand, in Ibsen’s play, with Paul 
it was ‘“‘all or nothing.’”’ The Law demanded righteousness. 
Paul was not one who could evade the severity of this 
demand by emphasising the complacency of God with 
human weakness. What God had demanded, he would 
fulfil, and, for the time, he thought himself “ immaculate 
by the standard of legal righteousness.’”’? But this con- 
fidence passed away. ‘The Law he could obey in act, but 
the tenth commandment did not deal with acts alone. 
It was concerned with feelings, and these he could not 
control. The very realisation of the sinfulness of his 
desires seemed to increase their strength. He approved 
the good, but he did the evil he detested. No longer could 
he count himself “‘ righteous before God.”’ 

Paul the Jew was not concerned with righteousness alone. 
He shared to the full in his people’s ardent hopes for the 
coming of the Messianic age. The Christians claimed that 
that age had come ; that the Jesus who had been crucified 
had been proved to be the Messiah by the Resurrection. 
That to Paul would have seemed a terrible claim. How 
could a crucified man be the Messiah? The very fact 
that He had hung upon a gibbet was the proof that He 
was accursed of God. Yet the Christians claimed to be 
already in the Messianic age, and their joy and vigour did 
seem to show the powers of the “‘ age to come.” Paul had 
seen Stephen’s triumphant death. To this man, dissatisfied 


1 As Titius says, “Sin and the possession of the Spirit could well go together, 
but the Lordship of sin and the Lordship of the Spirit could not be thought of as 
simultaneous (Der Paulinismus unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Seligkeit, p. 80). 

* Phil. iii. 6 (Moffatt). 

* It may well be that this discovery was due to a report of the teaching of Jesus. 
It is not clear if the word used in v. 7 should be translated ‘‘ thou shalt not covet ”’ 
or ‘ thou shalt not lust”’; éw.@uujoets, as Sanday and Headlam point out, ‘includes 
every kind of illicit desire.” 


36 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS {a1 


with his own religion, it must have been a memory hard 
to expe]. Fear impels to cruelty, and it is not fanciful to 
suppose that the violence with which Paul persecuted the 
Church was due in part to the sense of his own failure to 
win peace of heart, and his dread that, after all, the 
Christians’ claim was justified. At last, the crisis came. 
The exalted Christ whom Stephen saw appeared to him. 
The Jesus whom the Jews had crucified became his living 
Lord. 

This experience meant for Paul a complete transforma- 
tion of values. The old aspirations of Judaism remained, 
but they had received an unexpected fulfilment. The 
‘righteousness before God” he had sought to earn he 
found given him in Christ. The craving for redemption 
which the Messianic hopes expressed were met, for his 
communion with the exalted Lord had opened up to him 
already the powers of the “‘age to come.” It is little 
wonder that he wrote: ‘‘ There is a new creation whenever 
a man comes to be in Christ ; what is old is gone, the new 
has come. It is all the doing of the God who has reconciled | 
us to Himself through Christ.’’+ 

His conversion thus meant for St. Paul a new conception 
of the God he had eagerly sought to serve, and a new 
Lord, the risen Christ, whose servant he had now become. 

It meant a new conception of God. With Christ’s Cross 
in mind, it was impossible any longer to suppose that 
recompense was the final principle of God’s working.? 
The law’s function was temporary, and its meaning incom- 
plete. In the holy love of Christ upon the Cross, God’s 
relationship to men had at last found adequate expression. 
God is not only the ‘‘just,’’ He is the “ justifier.” The 
secret of His rule has now been fully shown in the forgive- 
ness which the Cross of Christ reveals—a forgiveness, not 


1 2 Cor. v. 17, 18. Moffatt’s trans. except that Moffatt has ‘‘ me ” for “‘ us.” 
* Such seems to be the purport of the difficult and much-disputed passage in 
Gal. iii. 9-14, on which see Burton’s Commentary, pp. 168-75, 


' 


11] ST. PAUL’S EPISTLES 37 


earned by works, but received by faith. So all ‘“‘ boasting ”’ 
is excluded.1 We cannot claim rights before God, nor 
need we nervously seek to earn His favour. 

Thus, in a quite new sense, God had become for Paul, 
the Father, for God’s Fatherhood could now be interpreted 
through Christ and Christ’s Cross. God is the Father of 
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. And He is our Father. 
He has given to us the Spirit of Sonship. He has made 
us, not children alone, but co-heirs with Christ. He has 
revealed His love to us in His ungrudging gift of His own 
Son, who died for us upon the Cross.? 

St. Paul’s conversion brought to him not only the 
answer to his quest for righteousness before God. It 
brought to him also the realisation of those hopes for 
deliverance from the bondage of this present age which 
as a Jew he had associated with the Messiah’s coming. 
Christ’s resurrection was to him as significant as His death. 
Through the Risen Christ, the Spirit was already operative 
in the life of the Church, so that Paul found that the 
powers of the “age to come” could now be realised in 
part on earth. Already Paul lived in the eternal sphere, 
for the eternal was no longer to him the remote and the 
unknown. In the eternal was Christ, the living Lord, 
with whom he had communion.? 

No phrase is more characteristic of St. Paul’s religion 
than the phrase which apparently he coined ‘In Christ 
Jesus.” It denotes, as Deissmann says, “ the most intimate 
communion conceivable between the Christian and the 
living Christ.”* He calls himself a ‘“‘man in Christ.”’ 
All his work was done in Him. In the Lord, he teaches. 
In the Lord, he has the seal of his apostleship. In Christ, 
God leads him in triumph. In Him are all the treasures 

1 Rom: iii. 21-7. 2 Rom. viii. 15-17, 32. 

* Cp. especially J. Kaftan’s essay, Die Paulinische Predigt vom Kreuz Christi 
(Zur Dogmatik, pp. 255-337), where the importance of Christ's Resurrection for 


Paul’s religion (and ours !) is well brought out. 
* Die neutestamentliche Formel, “ in Christo Jesu,” p. 98. 


38 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [1 


of wisdom and of knowledge. In Him may we be rich in 
all things. In the Lord the dead sleep. In Him will they 
be made alive. Thus in Christ he was freed from every 
tyranny. The law was no longer his bondmaster. Death 
was swallowed up in victory. No angels nor principalities, 
no powers of the Height nor of the Depth, could separate 
him from the love of God which was in Christ Jesus his 
Lord.? 

God was a God of grace. The Jesus whose followers he 
had persecuted was the risen Lord—these then were the 
two great discoveries of St. Paul’s conversion. They made 
him at once a missionary. Henceforth his one task in life 
was to be the ambassador of Christ, beseeching men to 
be reconciled to God in Him.? 

It is as a missionary that Paul is best understood. Save 
that he had behind him no long Christian tradition, his 
task was not unlike that of a missionary in India to-day 
who has to present Christianity at once to Muhammadans, 
proud of their monotheism, and hating any worship of the 
creature ; and to Hindus, not unwilling to acknowledge 
Christ as one Lord among many, but resentful of the 
intolerance of Christianity, and contemptuous of any 
attempt to connect the revelation of God with one historic 
figure. Some missionaries there are who proclaim the 
Gospel to Muhammadans and Hindus alike in the set 
words of orthodoxy, and, as their vocabulary owes 


1 For a full list of passages, see Deissmann, op. cit., pp. 118-24. 

2 To understand these words, we need to think of a modern convert in Benares, 
say, or Madura, who, although he believes that Hindu gods exist, and that the 
demons which once he feared still seek his harm, is certain that Christ is stronger 
than demigods or devils, and that through faith in Him he can be kept safe from 
their power. 

* It seems altogether too academic to suppose that Paul went to Arabia (Gal. 
i, 17), that there in the wilderness he might work out the implicates of the Christian 
faith. More probable is J. Weiss’ suggestion that he uses the word Arabia in the 
political sense of the kingdom of Aretas, of which Petra was the chief town. As 
Weiss says, ‘‘ For a personality such as Paul’s there could scarcely be anything 
between passionate hate and glowing love, and the account in Acts which says that 
he ‘ straightway’ (Acts ix. 20) preached in the synagogues of Damascus, even if 
it be not chronologically correct, has a high historic right; its ‘ straightway’ has 
a pathos which comes direct from the soul of Paul” (Urchristentuwm, p. 145). 


11] ST. PAUL’S EPISTLES 39 


nothing to their hearers, they fail to make their message 
understood. Some few there are who, in their desire to 
find points of contact, lose the sense of the distinctiveness 
of Christianity, and tend to make an ineffective synthesis 
of Christian and non-Christian systems. Others there are 
who, through the intensity of their own religion, are able 
to explore alien aspirations, and, through the very con 

fidence of their faith, seek, without fear of compromise, 
to relate the Christian message to the needs of those among 
whom they work. And such we may believe was St. Paul. 
In his eagerness, by every means, to save some, he became 
all things to all men; to the Jews a Jew, to the Greeks a 
Greek.1 We find in his writings not the ‘‘ Christology ”’ 
of a systematic theologian, but the vivid and occasional 
utterances of one whose theology was part of his missionary 
work, and who preached Christ, not in the categories 
of a coherent philosophy, but in terms derived from the 
religious aspirations of those whom at the time he was 
seeking to win for his Master. He had no new Gospel. 
He claimed that his was the common message of the 
Christian Church, and there is no evidence that he was 
ever accused, even by his most malignant enemies, of 
innovation here.2 The Christ he preached was the same- 
as that preached by the other apostles, and yet it was a 
greater Christ, for it was a Christ interpreted by new needs, 
and related to the religious aspirations, not of Judaism 
alone, but of the Greco-Oriental world to which he was 
the missionary. 

That is part of our difficulty in understanding his 
meaning. Without some knowledge of Paul’s age, the 
living terms he used to make intelligible his Gospel appear 
as the dead terms of a tedious pedantry. The categories 
of current thought into which he translated the Christian 

1 Cp. 1 Cor. ix. 19-22. 

* It is true that Paul does speak in Phil. iii. 18 of men who were “‘ enemies of the 


Cross of Christ,” but he is referring here, not to heretics, but to libertines, to men 
who denied the Cross of Christ, not by their teaching, but by their lives. 


40 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS {a1 


message require themselves to be translated. Thus the 
very adaptability of his missionary genius, by relating 
him intimately to his own time, has made him seem remote 
from ours, And the difficulty of understanding his words 
has been immensely increased by the attempts which have 
been made to find in his Epistles a formal system. What 
we have in his Epistles is not ‘‘ Paulinism,’” but the 
passionate proclamation of Christianity by a missionary 
whose supreme concern was not to formulate a final 
theology, but so to present his message that others might 
share in his new and vivifying experience of the grace of 
God, manifested in Christ his Lord. As we turn to examine 
the terms which Paul used to describe Christ, we have to 
remember that they are of subordinate importance. They 
are to be studied, not as the “ proof texts” of a final 
Christology, but as illustrations of the place and function 
which he assigned to Christ. 

It will be convenient to deal first with-the unusually 
elaborate description of Christ given in the opening verses 
of the Epistle to the Romans. In it, Paul, probably with 
Jewish opposition in mind, declares that the Gospel to 
which he was set apart was a Gospel which had been 
foretold by the Old Testament prophets. That Gospel 
was a Gospel concerning the Son of God. It presents Him 
in a twofold way. In His earthly life, He was David’s 
son, and thus fulfilled one of the popular expectations of 
the Messiah. By the Resurrection, He was ‘“‘defined’’ as 
Son of God with power, by the spirit of holiness. The 
details of the exegesis are obscure. The final words are 
sometimes taken to denote the Holy Spirit ; more probably 
they denote the holiness inherent in Christ’s spirit. Nor 
is it certain whether the word we have translated defined 
(sperGevros) denotes ‘“‘ designated’ or “installed.” But 
the general meaning seems to be clear. We have not 
here an “ Adoptianist’’ Christology. Christ did not 
begin to be the Son on “adoption” by God at the 


11] ST. PAUL’S EPISTLES 4) 


Resurrection,! but after His holy life on earth, where He 
had been born of David’s stock, He became manifest as 
Son of God with power through the Resurrection. This, 
says Paul, is the twofold declaration which the Gospel 
makes about Jesus Christ our Lord. 

In the same Epistle, St. Paul illustrates the importance 
of the coming of Christ in the race’s history by a reference 
to Adam.? Through Adam, death had set up his reign 
over men. Then came Moses and the Law which made 
of sin guilt. Now had come Jesus Christ, and through the 
man Jesus Christ ‘‘ the grace of God and the gift by the 
grace of the one man Jesus Christ abound unto the many.” 
A similar thought seems to be expressed in the much- 
discussed passages of 1 Corinthians xv. By man came 
death ; by man came also the resurrection of the dead. 
In Adam all die; through the risen Christ shall all be 
made alive. So Christ is spoken of as the last Adam. 
The first man Adam became a living soul*; the last Adam 
a life-giving spirit. Death came through Adam; life 
through Christ. The first man is of the earth, earthy, 
material ; the second man is from heaven. Thus ‘“‘ Adam 
as the founder and head of the old humanity is set over 
against Christ as the fountain and head of the new.’’6 
Thus each race bears the likeness of its founder. “ As is 
the earthy, such are they also that are earthy ; as is the 
heavenly (man), such are they also that are heavenly (i.e. 
that are united to Christ).” Just as the descendants of 
Adam shared in his mortality, so by their relation to Christ, 
those that believe in Him will partake in His risen glory. 
It is the resurrection body that Paul is here discussing. 
Both in the passage in Romans and in this chapter, it is 


1 The passage has to be read in the light of Rom. viii. 3 (God, sending His Son), 
where the pre-existence of the Son is clearly implied. 
2 Rom, v. 12-21. 3 1] Cor. xv. 20-2. 


* 1 Cor, xv. 45, els Wuxny {Hoav where Moffatt translates “‘ animate being.” 
5 els mvedua (worotovy, 


* Morgan, The Religion and Theology of Paul, p. 55, 


42 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS {11 


with the work of the risen Christ that he is concerned, not 
with theories of the pre-existence of a ‘‘ Heavenly Man,” 
whether derived from apocalyptic phantasies, Philonic 
speculations, or pagan myths. 

Elsewhere Paul clearly teaches Christ’s pre-existence. 
It is implied, as we have seen, in Romans viii. 3. It is 
explicitly expressed in 1 Corinthians x. 4, where Christ 
is called the Rock from which the Israelites in their 
wanderings drank.? It seems to be taught in the great 
passage in the second chapter of Philippians. It receives 
full and emphatic statement in Colossians, 

Few passages in the New Testament have been more 
elaborately discussed than this passage of Philippians and 
around its meaning much of the controversy about the 
Kenotic interpretation of Christ’s person has raged.* The 


1 Only here is Christ spoken of as the second Adam or the Heavenly Man. 
Philo, basing his argument on the twofold account of the creation of man given in 
Genesis, taught that the first man was heavenly in that he had been made after 
the image of God (Gen. i. 26), whilst the second was earthy; formed out of dust 
(Gen. ii. 7). It is claimed that we have here the genesis of Paul’s Christology, and 
the explanation of his belief in Christ’s pre-existence. Thus Holtzmann, who 
admits that Paul’s doctrine is not exactly Philonic, seeks to show that it grew 
out of the same stock as Jewish reflections on the Creation story, and sees in this 
doctrine the metaphysical background of his conception of Christ (Lehrbuch der 
neutestamentlichen T'heologie?, II., p. 61). Johannes Weiss sees in the word Man 
a less barbarous translation into Greek of the Aramaic phrase rendered in the 
Synoptics “ Son of Man,” and points out that Paul’s thought differs from Philo’s in 
that it is eschatologically conditioned, and would connect it rather with the picture 
of the Son of Man in Enoch (Urchristentum, p. 374 ff.). Reitzenstein, who denies 
that the passage can be explained from Jewish Messianic belief, or from Philo’s 
teaching, explains the whole of 1 Cor. xv. from ethnic myths, and seeks to estab- 
lish the belief in Paul’s time in a divine being, “Man” (Die Hellenistischen 
Mysterienreligionen*, pp. 194-204; ep. his Poimandres, pp. 81-98, where a 
Naassene Discourse is given containing a Hellenistic myth of a god Anthropos, 
““Man’”’). Bousset admits the distinctiveness of Paul’s conception, but claims 
that at least we have now parallel ethnic ideas “‘ which for the first time explain 
and unlock for us the essence of the Pauline mystic speculation ” (Kyrios Christos’, 
p. 143). Such explanations seem to go far beyond the needs of a sober exegesis. 
In these passages, it is not the nature of the pre-existent Christ Paul is discussing, 
but the work of the post-incarnate Christ, and nowhere in Paul’s thought does the 
idea of the ‘“‘ Second Man ”’ stand in the foreground (see the incisive article by Dr. 
H. A. A. Kennedy in the Expositor, Feb., 1914, on St. Paul and the Conception 
of the ‘‘ Heavenly Man’’). 

* Paul’s reference is apparently suggested by the Rabbinic legend that the 
smitten rock, from which water flowed, journeyed onwards with the Israelites. 

* For the Kenotic School see later, pp. 174-82, 220-4, It is from the word in this 
passage, translated “‘ emptied Himself” (éxévwoe), that the term Kenotic is derived. 


, 


[11 ST. PAUL’S EPISTLES 43 


two problems should be kept distinct. The Kenotic theory 
cannot be based upon a single text. It is a hypothesis, 
which, if accepted, is to be accepted because it seems best 
to explain the Christian facts. Some of the commentators 
on this passage seem more eager to prove or disprove the 
Kenotic theory than to find out what Paul meant. Paul 
is not writing with technical precision, or in the interests of 
a recondite theory. He is not explaining the mode of the 
Incarnation. He is concerned to use the fact of the Incarna- 
tion as the supreme incentive to humble Christian love. 
Who is the subject of this self-emptying? Is it the 
incarnate or the pre-incarnate Christ ? It is probable that 
the antithesis is a false one, and that Paul is not in this 
passage thus dividing Christ’s career. Again, what is the 
meaning of the words translated in our versions “‘in the 
form of God’??? It seems useless to discuss the phrase 
as if it were found in a philosopher of the best Greek period. 
Apparently it denotes nothing more precise than this, 
“who was by nature God.” Paul does not define the 
extent of the self-emptying, and any attempt to do so 
probably goes beyond his thought; but it would seem 
that the self-emptying was connected with that ‘‘ equality 
with God which He did not count a prize to be grasped 
at.” So He took the nature of a man. His humility and 
obedience were consummated on the Cross. But that was 
not the end of all. God raised Him up; and gave Him 
the name which is above every name. Paul’s words partake 
less of the nature of definition than of adoration. The 
Cross at which Jews and Gentiles jeered, was for him 
“the wisdom of God.’’? The crucified carpenter must have 


1 Cp. 2 Cor. viii. 9, the nearest parallel to this passage, where Paul reminds his 
readers that “ though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor,” in order 
that they might give a generous collection. 

2 év uoppy Oeod. 

? On this passage see especially Kennedy in Expositor’s Greck Testament, The 
passage is very elaborately discussed from the Kenotic standpoint by Bensow, Die 
Lehre von der Kenose, pp. 174-229, and from the anti-Kenotic standpoint by 
Gifford, The Incarnation, a Study of Phil. II. 5-11. 


44 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [11 


seemed a strange rival to the pagan gods. Paul finds in 
the very scandal of the Cross the supreme illustration of 
that love which must inspire ours. He, who was by nature 
God, for our salvation, and for the glory of God, when He 
appeared on earth, did not come in the dazzling glory of a 
pagan theophany. He became truly man; obedient right 
up to the death of the Cross. Through the Resurrection, 
He becomes manifest Lord, thus regaining in a more glorious 
way that Lordship, that equality with God, on which He 
had not set store. We have here the mystery of the 
Incarnation and the Cross conveyed in the vivid picture- 
words of religion. It is useless to try to get from this 
passage answers to problems in which we have no evidence 
that Paul took any interest. 

So far, in every reference we have studied, St. Paul’s 
interpretation of Christ has been reached from the stand- 
point of man’s redemption. In two passages, St. Paul 
speaks of our Lord in terms of the world’s creation.1 Such 
references seem, at first sight, alien from what we know 
of Paul’s character and genius. He was no philosopher. 
Why then should he trouble himself with interests which 
seem remote from the immediate experience of redemption ? 
In neither passage has Paul to teach the doctrine of Christ’s 
pre-existence. It is a belief which he assumes his readers 
already share. It is noteworthy that here, too, the 
theological statement is made in the context of practical 
exhortation. Itis probable, as Dr. Kennedy points out, that 
it is “‘ superfluous to suppose, as has so often been done, 
that Paul was absorbed in subtle speculations as to the 
relation of the pre-existent Christ to the universe.” Whether 
Paul was influenced by Philo’s conception of the Logos, we 
donot know. ‘Stoic influence was extremely wide-spread ” 
and “‘the notion of powers, semi-personal, semi-abstract, 
which linked the world to God, must have prevailed 


? 1 Cor. viii. 6 and Col. i. 13-18. It is noteworthy that the first passage comes 
from an Epistle indubitably Paul's. 


11] ST. PAUL’S EPISTLES 45 


on a large scale. So that it is impossible to trace precisely 
the genesis of Paul’s conception.”! In the passage in 
1 Corinthians he is concerned to assert the supremacy of 
Christ. The Corinthian Christians were familiar with gods 
many, and lords many, but “ there is one God, the Father, 
from whom all comes, and for whom we exist ; one Lord, 
Jesus Christ, by whom all exists, and by whom we exist.’”? 
So there was no need for the Christians to fear the power 
of pagan gods and lords. Theirs was the one God, theirs 
the one Lord, the agent of God’s creation. 

In the passage in Colossians, this thought finds fuller 
and bolder expression. There was a danger at Colossz 
that the Christians should cringe before subordinate beings, 
whether the “‘angels’’ of late Judaism, or the demigods 
of paganism. Paul reminds his readers that the Father 
has rescued them ‘‘ from the power of the Darkness, and 
transferred them to the realm of His beloved Son,” ‘‘ In 
Him we enjoy our redemption, that is, the forgiveness 
of sins. He is the likeness? of the unseen God, born first 
before all the creation—for it was by Him that all things 
were created, both in heaven and on earth, both the seen 
and the unseen, including Thrones, angelic Lords, celestial 
Powers and Rulers; all things have been created by Him 
and for Him ; He is prior to all, and all coheres in Him.’’4 

In Romans viii. 38, 39, Paul had declared that no 
spiritual powers could separate us from the love of God 
in Christ. Here he explains the authority which Christ 
has over such powers by asserting that He was the agent 
of God in the creation, not of things seen alone, but of 
things unseen. But at once Paul returns to the relation 
of the risen Christ to believing men. “ He is the head of 
the Body, that is, of the Church, in virtue of His primacy 


1 See Kennedy, The Logos-Doctrine of St. Paul, Expositor, Jan., 1924. 

2 Moffatt’s trans. 

* elxwy, cp. 2 Cor.iv.6. God has “ shined in our hearts to give the light of the 
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” 

* Moffatt’s trans. 


46 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [11 


as the first to be born from the dead—that gives Him 
pre-eminence over aJl. For it was in Him that the divine 
Fulness! willed to settle without limit, and by Him it 
willed to reconcile in His own person all on earth and in 
heaven alike, in a peace made by the blood of His Cross.’’? 
Thus did Paul the missionary seek to relate to Christ the 
theosophy of his environment. Whatever spiritual powers 
there be, in creation, as in grace, there is only one Mediator, 
Jesus Christ, the Church’s risen Lord. The passage 
throughout is thus related to practical needs, and ends, 
as it began, with the thought of Christ’s redemptive 
work. 

What then of the human life of the Christ to whom 
Paul assigns so sublime a place ? Some would deny that 
Paul had any real interest in the human life of Jesus. 
Thus Wrede claims ‘‘ what we prize in the man Jesus, 
plays no part whatever in the thought of the apostle. 
Nothing is further aloof from him than religious veneration 
for a hero, The moral majesty of Jesus, His purity and 
piety, His ministry among His people, His manner as a 
prophet, the whole concrete ethical-religious content of 
His earthly life, signifies for Paul’s Christology—nothing 
whatever. The ‘manhood’ appears to be a purely 
formal thing.’’? 

That Paul’s attitude to Christ was not the hero-worship 
of the “ Jesusism ”’ of some ‘‘ liberal” scholars, we may 
well agree, but Wrede’s conclusion seems to go far beyond 
the facts. As Jiilicher remarks, “ An Apostle of Jesus 
Christ who declined to know anything of the earthly life 

1 rrjpwua, Inii. 9 he states that the full ‘‘ pleroma” of deity dwelt in Christ 
“ bodily,” cwuarikds, 2 Moffatt’s trans. 

* Paul, p. 89. Wrede derives Paul’s picture of Christ from his pre-Christian 
Messiah Dogmatic. Brickner, who derives it from pagan myths of a dying and 
rising Redeemer-god, comes to the same conclusion. ‘‘ The Christ-picture of Paul 
is in its essential features, independent of the historical person of Jesus. The Son 
of God and Heavenly Man, through whom the world was created and is to be re- 
deemed, appears here in human form on earth, only to die and then to rise again in 


glory and be exalted at the right hand of God”’ (Der sterbende und auferstehende 
Gottheiland, p, 35.) 


11] ST. PAUL’S EPISTLES 47 


of the Messiah and who, in the interests of his dogma, 
contemptuously ignored as ‘ weakness of the flesh,’ what 
was revealed through the appearance of the Son of God 
‘in the form of a servant,’ is the product of our modern 
mania for consistency—he is not the Paul of history.’’} 
Paul’s Epistles were not addressed to those quite ignorant 
of Christianity. They were missionary letters written to 
people who were already Christians, however immature 
might be their Christianity. Such missionary letters deal 
with the pressing problems of infant communities. It 
would be strange if they gave full details of Christ’s life. 
It would seem that Paul’s indifference to the words of 
Jesus has been over-emphasised,? whilst, as has often 
been pointed out, his description of love in 1 Cor. xiii. 4-7 
could scarcely have been written by a man of his tempera- 
ment without some knowledge of the character of Jesus. 
It is difficult to believe that he would have persecuted the 
Christians without any inquiry into their beliefs. Besides, 
if the record of Acts be trusted, he had heard Stephen’s 
dying testimony. It is true that his Christian experience 
began with his vision of the risen Lord. But visions do 
not come out of nothing. They receive their form and 
colour from impressions already in the mind. 

Whether, as two of the most important of recent books 
on Paul suggest, Paul was actually in Jerusalem during 
the lifetime of Jesus, it is impossible to say.* If we could 
assume that he had seen Him die, we could better under- 
stand his poignant references to the Cross. But this, at 
least, seems clear. The Lord he served was one with 
the Jesus who had lived on earth, who had come in the 
likeness of our flesh, though without sin, who had been 
of the Seed of David, who had been crucified ‘‘ from 
weakness,” obedient unto death, the death of the Cross, 


* Paulus und Jesus, p. 55. 

2 Cp. the parallels given in Titius, op. cif., pp. 12-8 

* J. Weiss, Se hae pp. 135 ff. and 346 ff. and Feine, Theologie des Neuen 
Testaments*, p. 222 


48 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS {xz 


and whose “‘meekness and gentleness”? were known 
throughout the Churches.! 

To Paul when a Jew, God had been the sole object of 
devotion. Now his message is Christ. He felt no contra- 
diction here. His service to Christ made his devotion to 
God more complete. He prays to Christ, speaks of Him at 
the right hand of God, our intercessor, and declares that to 
Him “every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and things 
in earth and things under the earth.’’? The judgement day 
will be the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. Apparently 
Paul did not call Christ God,* but it is clear that he assigns 
to the exalted Lord divine functions. Yet so inseparable 
are God and Christ in his experience that his faith in 
Christ in no way perplexes his monotheism. Christ is 
God’s, as we are Christ’s.> It is God’s work that He 
accomplishes, and, when He has accomplished it, He will 
hand it over to God, that God may be all in all.® It is 
God’s glory that shines in Christ’s face.’ .To receive the 
word of Christ and to follow Him, means conversion to 
the true and living God. Often Paul so interchanges the 
words “‘ Lord’ and ‘“‘ God” as to show that they are one 
in his experience.* As Christ’s ambassador, it is God that 
speaks through him. His prayer on behalf of Christ is that 
men may be reconciled to God.® As the familiar words 

1 Rom. viii. 3, i. 3, Phil. ii. 8, 2 Cor. x. 1. 

2 1 Thess, iii. 11 (cp. 1 Cor. xvi. 22), Rom. viii. 34, Phil. ii. 10. 

* 1 Cor. i. 8. 

* Unless it be in Rom. ix. 5, where the translation is doubtful. If the Epistle to 
Titus can be regarded as Paul’s, there is a parallel passage in ii. 13, but here, too, 
the translation is doubtful. 

5 1 Cor. iii. 23. 

® 1 Cor. xv. 24-8. It is possible that we have here a trace of “ inferiorism,” so 
that Christ is regarded as intermediary, not, as elsewhere in Paul, as mediator. 
But the passage should probably be interpreted, not of Christ’s person, but of His 
function in redemption. It is a rhetorical passage based on Psalm viii. Paul is 
concerned to say that Christ’s work as redeemer will one day be complete, so that 
He will be able to hand over to God a perfected Kingdom. 

7 2 Cor. iv. 6. 

* Cp. Rom. xiv. 6-12. Whoso eats to the Lord gives God thanks. We belong in 
life and death to the Lord. We need to remember that we shall all stand before the 


judgement seat of God (the judgement seat of Christ of the A.V. has inferior M.S. 
authority). 9 2 Cor, v. 20. 


11] ST. PAUL’S EPISTLES 49 


of the Benediction remind us, the grace of Christ was for 
him one with the love of God and the communion of the 
Holy Spirit. 


A new conception of God and a new Lord—these were 
what Paul gained at his conversion. And these two were 
one, for the meaning of God was given him in Christ, and 
the Lordship of Christ was for him inseparable from the 
monarchy of God. 

How is Paul’s Christianity to be judged? Is it a 
legitimate expression of Christian faith or have we, in 
loyalty to the religion of Jesus, to reject the Christianity 
of Paul and, if so, how are we to account for this alien 
growth? This is an old and familiar problem. It is 
inevitable that those who see in Jesus just the first true 
believer in God the Father, should feel that Paul had a 
different religion from his Master, for Paul preached Christ 
as a living and eternal Lord. This controversy has in 
recent years been discussed with fresh vigour, and from 
new standpoints. Paul’s “ Christ-cult ’’ is now commonly 
assigned, not as formerly to the immanent necessities of 
his logic, but to the influence of current Jewish beliefs in 
a Heavenly Man or of pagan mystery-cults with their 
redeemer-gods.+ 

Of the first view Wrede was the best-known exponent. 
To Wrede, Paul is primarily a theologian whose theology 
was his religion. This theology he had in substance before 
he was a Christian. He believed in “a celestial being, a 
divine Christ, before he believed in Jesus,’’? and at the 
moment of his conversion, when he thought he saw Jesus 
in His risen glory, he transferred to Jesus all the con- 
ceptions he already had of a heavenly Christ. So, as we 

1 I have incorporated in this section a few sentences from an article on The 
Ten Best Books on the Life and Teaching of St. Paul, which appeared in the 


Expositor, May, 1924. 
* Paul, p. 151. 


D 


50 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [ir 


have seen, Wrede claims that Paul’s picture of Christ was 
not derived from any impression of the person of Jesus. 
It is curious to notice the contrast between the confidence 
with which Wrede asserts the existence of this complete 
Messiah Dogmatic with the reserve with which he brings 
out the necessary proofs. All that he can claim is that 
“Jewish apocalyptic books are really cognizant of a 
Messiah, who before His appearance lives in heaven, and 
is more exalted than the angels themselves.’”! Such a 
heavenly Christ is far inferior to the Lord whom Paul 
claimed to be the universal Saviour, and, for all the 
brilliancy and vigour of his book, Wrede has failed to win 
many adherents for his theory. 
~ More popular to-day is the attempt to derive Paul’s 
doctrine of Christ from myths current in the pagan world, 
and especially from those connected with the pagan 
mystery-cults with their redeemer-gods. Much of the 
literature concerned is as’ yet inadequately dated and 
explored, and many of the passages quoted are far less 
impressive in their context than when presented in a 
catena of quotations.* It is inevitable that parallels should 
be sought, but such parallels need to be checked more 
closely than some of the enthusiasts of this school have 
done, and common tendencies of paganism should not, 
without further proof, be taken as evidences of mystery- 
cults. It is as yet by no means certain that such cults 
were prevalent in the Roman Empire as early as Paul’s 
time. If cults connected with the myth of a God who died 
and rose again were as prominent then as some scholars 
claim, it is strange that the preaching of Christ crucified 
should have been not only a ‘“‘scandal’”’ to the Jews, but 
** foolishness ’’ to the Greeks. 

That Paul was influenced by the craving for redemption 


1 Op. ett., p. 152. 
* Cp. Reitzenstein’s use of the Hermetic literature to provide parallels with the 
thought-world of Paul and the Fourth Gospel. 


IT] ST. PAUL’S EPISTLES 51 


which marked the best paganism of his age, interpreted 
his Gospel by it, and made claims for Christ in deliberate 
rivalry with claims made for pagan demigods, seems clear. 
If the cults of the redeemer-gods existed in his time, 
doubtless they too influenced his vocabulary, and affected 
the presentation of his message. He would not have been 
the supreme missionary he was had he not thus been 
responsive to his environment. And there seems evidence 
to show that then, as now, converts from paganism thought 
of Christianity in a partly pagan way.! But to derive 
Paul’s central message of a divine Redeemer from pagan 
myths of gods who die and rise again, is surely a confusion 
of form with content, possible only for scholars to whom 
Paul’s faith is unintelligible and so repellent. A missionary 
does not increase his inheritance ; he learns to possess it. 
That we may believe is what Paul did. It seems quite 
unlikely that Paul did what no missionary we know of has 
done; he gave his life for a message which derived, not 
its form only, but its content from the peoples among whom 
he worked. Those who so argue know neither the cost 
nor the meaning of missionary service. 

This at least seems clear. Paul, in his essential Gospel, 
was no originator. He enriched Christianity by the fervour 
of what, for lack of a better name, we may call his Christ- 
mysticism. He increased the range of its conceptions, by 
exploring its implicates with pagan needs and beliefs in 
mind, but, in substance, his Gospel was that of the whole 
Church of his time. If Christianity owes its distinctive 
faith in Christ as Lord to mystery-cults, that was not 
Paul’s work. The transformation was effected before his 
time. 

That much is admitted by the more cautious members 


1 Weinel points out that it was probably the very people who denied the resur- 
rection from the dead who so strongly believed in Sacraments that they had 
themselves “ baptised for the dead,” 1 Cor. xv. 29, and, believing that Sacraments 
worked ex opere operato, drew consequences which were opposed to morality, Cp. 
1 Cor. x. 1-13 (Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments*, p. 309 f°). 


52 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [ur 


of the religio-historical school. Thus in his book The Earlier 
Epistles of St. Paul, Lake concedes that Paul cannot be 
held responsible for the transformation, and claims that 
it was at Antioch that there began the transition from 
“the belief that the Messiah was Jesus, and that He was 
speedily coming to set up His Kingdom of God, to the 
creed in which the original meaning of the word ‘ Messiah’ 
or ‘Christ’ was almost wholly forgotten: Jesus was 
regarded as a Redeemer-God, and the Sacraments became 
the real centre of Christianity.”’} So Morgan affirms that 
‘on the soil of a strict monotheism ”’ the belief that Jesus 
was Lord ‘‘ did not, and could not arise. There is but one 
possible explanation, and it is to be found in the fact that 
at any early period of its history Christianity was carried 
from the soil of Judaism to that of Hellenism,’’ where there 
were mystery-cults which called their patron divinities 
‘gord 404 

It is admitted that we have little certain evidence of 
such mystery-cults so early as Paul’s time, but it is claimed 
that such must have existed in Syria when Christianity 
first reached Antioch. Here again, although recognising 
the influence of form on content, we have to avoid their 
identification. If there were such cults at Antioch, it is 
natural that Christ should have been regarded by pagan > 
converts in much the same way as pagans regarded their 
redeemer-gods. But the word “ Lord ”’ was not in the early 
Church an empty title. It denoted the rich content of the 
Church’s experience of the living Christ. As we have seen, 
there is good reason to believe that Jesus was called Lord 
by the Jerusalem Church, and that He was so called because 
these first believers in the Risen Lord found no word so 
adequate to express the place He now had in their lives. 

Even if, against the evidence of Acts, we believe that 

1 Second edit., p. 45. 

* The Religion and Theology of Paul, p. 47, so also Weinel, op. cit., p, 239, and 


Bousset, Kyrios Christos*, p, 76 ff. 
§ See earlier, p. 33. 


11] ST. PAUL’S EPISTLES 53 


Jesus was first called Lord at Antioch, the problem is not 
solved. There would not have been a Christianity to 
preach at Antioch, had it not been for the Easter certainty 
that Christ was risen. If He rose from the dead, that was 
a new fact for which “‘ Jewish monotheism ”’ and modern 
“ Jesusism”’ are alike inadequate. It is on dogmatic 
grounds that the belief in Jesus as Lord is thus explained 
away. It is not a question of scholarship. It is a question 
of how we judge of Christianity, and those who see in the 
Jesus of the Gospels one inexplicable by merely human 
categories, and who share themselves in the faith of the 
early Church that ours is not a dead master but a living 
Lord, will see no reason to assign to pagan influences, not 
the form alone, but the very content of the Christian 
message. It is hard to believe that Christianity was based 
upon a misunderstanding, and that from that misunder- 
standing has sprung the vital experience of the Church 
in every age. 


It has seemed best to devote this chapter chiefly to an 
exposition of St. Paul’s Christology, for the classic Christian 
faith of the early Church can here be discussed from 
documents in regard to which critics have reached an 
almost unanimous conclusion.! After the death of St. Paul 
all is obscure, and the study of the development of Christian 
thought is beset by critical problems which are as yet 
unsolved. In the space at our disposal, it is impossible 
to do more than briefly to describe the two other great 
New Testament interpretations of Christ, the Epistle to the 
Hebrews and the Johannine writings.? 


1 The Epistles on which our account was based, 1 Thess., Gal., i. and ii. Cor., 
Rom., Phil. and Col., are widely recognised as Paul’s, although a few scholars 
still question the authenticity of 1 Thess. and Col. 

2 It has seemed better not to attempt any discussion of James and 1 Peter 
as they contribute little to our subject, and their interpretation depends on very 
difficult critical problems. 


54 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [11 


The Epistle to the Hebrews. 


On the view of this Epistle which till recently has been 
current in England, the Epistle has great intrinsic interest, 
but, as addressed to Jews, tempted before the fall of 
Jerusalem to relapse into Judaism, has little importance 
for the history of Christian thought. If, with many German 
scholars, and the two most recent English commentators,* 
we see in the Epistle a work addressed, not specially to 
Jews, but to a Church in which the old distinction between 
Jew and Gentile had lost its meaning, then the Epistle 
gains a quite new significance. It is then brought into the 
main current of Christian development, and is of the 
greatest value for our purposes as a witness to the inter- 
pretation of Christ in the little-known period between the 
Epistles of St. Paul and the compilation of the Johannine 
writings.? 

In spite of its dialectical form, the purpose of the letter 
is not speculative, but practical. It is a “‘ word of exhorta- 
tion,” addressed to those who, in that period of transition, 
needed to be reminded of the splendour of the Christian 
religion, that so they might take in its service a worthier 
and more costly part. The Old Testament was already 
the common Bible of the Church, and the letter is designed 
to prove from it the perfection of Christianity, by showing 
that it is the reality of which’ the Old Testament forms 
of revelation and of worship were but the transient and 
imperfect shadows. 

God, who had spoken to the men of old in various ways 
through prophets, has spoken to us through a Son, and to 
the Son is to be ascribed those majestic titles which 

1 E. F. Scott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, 1922. Moffatt in the International 
Critical Commentary, 1924. So also H. L. MacNeill in his monograph, The Chris- 
tology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 1914. 

* As the Epistle is utilised in the Epistle of Clement of Rome, which is usually 
dated as A.D. 95, the Epistle ‘‘ cannot be later than about a.p. 85; how much 


earlier it is we cannot say, but the controversy about the Law, which marked the 
Pauline phase, is evidently over,” Moffatt, op. cit., p. xxii. 


; 
; 


11] THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 55 


Alexandrian Judaism had already given to the “ Logos,”’ 
the divine ‘‘ Word ”’ or “‘ Reason,”’ who, in Philo’s thought, 
acts as intermediary between the transcendent God and 
the created world. The Son is the heir of all things, the 
agent of the world’s creation. ‘“ Reflecting God’s bright 
glory and stamped with God’s own character,” He “‘ sustains 
the universe with His word of power.’? Although the 
Epistle thus begins with categories derived from that 
Hellenised Judaism we connect with the great name of 
Philo of Alexandria, it owes its distinctive teaching, not 
to such speculation, but to the primitive tradition of the 
Church, with its reminiscences of that human Jesus whom 
the Church had discovered to be the Lord of glory. The 
real humanity of Jesus was no stumbling-block to this 
writer. Instead, it seemed to him essential to His saving 
work. Only one who thus had known the discipline of 
sorrow and temptation was able to be the true High Priest. 
Alexandrian speculation was thus left far behind. Philo 
had indeed called the Logos the great High Priest, meaning 
apparently by this that the Logos as the divine Reason 
mediates between men and God, and enables men to rise 
above the material into the world of ideas where alone is 
reality. With Philo, the conception was thus primarily 
speculative. For the writer to the Hebrews, the religious 
interest is supreme. The High Priest he speaks of is not 
an abstract essence, but a living person, one who became 
truly man, sharing in human weakness, tasting death to 
its bitter dregs.? 

No New Testament writer so successfully relates the 
humiliation of Christ to our salvation. It was in connexion 
with His suffering and death that He was crowned with 
glory and honour. He, the Pioneer (épyynyds) of men’s 
salvation, was made perfect through His sufferings that 

1 Heb. i, 2, 3 (Moffatt). Cp. Col. i. 16, where Paul also, without calling Christ 
the Logos, ascribes to Him terms already used in the Logos speculation. 


* For a comparison of the writer’s thought with that of Philo, see E. F, Scott, 
op. cit,, pp. 162-6, and Moffatt, op. cit., pp. xlvii-xlix, 


56 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [11 


so being made “‘ to resemble His brothers in every respect,” 
He might ‘prove a merciful and faithful High Priest,” 
able to help the tempted because of what He has suffered 
through His own temptations.4 Ours is not a High Priest, 
‘““who is incapable of sympathising with our weaknesses, 
but one who has been tempted in every respect like our- 
selves, yet without sinning.” A man remote from human 
weakness could not be a true High Priest, for he would 
be unable to deal gently with those who err in ignorance. 
Ours is a High Priest who “in the days of His flesh, 
with bitter cries and tears, offered prayers and sup- 
plications”? and ‘“‘was heard, because of His godly 
fear. Thus, Son though he was, He learned by all that 
He suffered how to obey, and, by being thus perfected, 
He became the source of eternal salvation for all who 
obey Him.’’? 

This true High Priest has ‘entered within the veil,” 
“into the holy place,” “into heaven itself,’ ‘“‘in the 
presence of God.” He is “set on the right hand of 
the Majesty in the heavens,’ whence He will appear 
to consummate the salvation of those who look for 
Him.$ 

To the pre-incarnate life of Christ, the letter naturally 
makes few references. Ménégoz has argued that the writer 
sees in Christ a supernatural, and yet a created Being, and 
cites in proof of this the passages which seem to speak of 
Him as pre-existent, but not eternal. This view is based 
partly on his exegesis of these passages, but more on his 
conception of the writer as a “‘ Philonian Christian seeking 
to explain from his philosophic premises the mysterious 
personality of Christ.””’ With these premises, he holds, it 
was inevitable that the writer’s doctrine should “ approach 
the doctrine of the Arians, rather than that of Athanasius, 


1 Heb. ii. 9-18 (from Moffatt’s trans. ). 
2 iv. 15—v. 10 (Moffatt). 
* vi. 20, ix. 12, ix, 24, viii. 1, ix. 28, 


11] THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 57 


and so was bound to disappear from the Church along with 
the belief in eons on which it was based.’ 

Here again we have to distinguish between form and 
content. If the writer owed the form of his thought to 
Philo, his conception of Christ came, not from the Alex- 
andrian synthesis, but from the common tradition of the 
Church. No one subservient to Alexandrian speculation 
would so have emphasised the humiliation of Christ’s 
earthly life. That he had not reached the full formulation 
of Niczea we may well agree, for the problem around which 
the Arian controversy raged was not yet in view. But 
his conception of Christ is not so much Arian as pre-Nicene. 
The Epistle belongs to a period of transition, and the writer 
interprets Christ in categories of primitive apocalyptic 
and Alexandrian speculation which are hard to unify. But, 
for all his dialectic, his purpose was not speculative, but 
practical and pastoral. His prime concern was not to 
define Christ’s person, but to strengthen his readers’ faith, 
and to increase their courage. This he did by showing that 
Christianity was superior to every phase of Old Testament 
religion, For the purpose of this argument, it was enough 
to prove that Christianity was “ better,” but the apologetic 
“better”? implies throughout the dogmatic “best.” 
Christianity was a religion, final because perfect. Already 
Christians were living “‘ at the close of the days.”’ Theirs 
was a religion of permanent worth and universal validity. 
Inherent in this claim is the belief that the Son, one with 
us in His manhood, is one with the Father from eternity. 
Thus in this Epistle we are already near to the rich synthesis 
of the Fourth Gospel. 


1 See his chapter on “ Le Christ” in his La Théologie de l Epitre aux Hebreux. 
He quotes in proof of his view the Old Testament quotations which seem to speak 
of a beginning of the Son’s existence and function (e.g. i. 5 and 9). The argument 
does not seem a strong one. It is in the general meaning of his quotations that he is 
interested. Nor does it seem apt to say that, if the writer had believed in Christ's 
essential divinity, he would not have made His |.nowledge of man’s misery depend 
on His incarnation, for God is omniscient. It is the writer’s aim to show that if 
Christ be the perfect mediator, the true High Priest, He must be our brother, as 
well as our Lord (cp. Matthew Arnold’s Sonnet, ‘‘ West London ”’). 


58 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [zz 


The Book of Revelation. 


It would be absurd to look in the Apocalypse for any 
formal statement of Christology. It is not a book of calm 
reflection, but a book whose words are battle cries. It was 
evidently written to arm its readers for their imminent 
conflict with the Roman power, not with the weapons 
of rebellion, but with a faith in the ultimate triumph of 
Christianity, which should give them courage to endure 
the worst cruelties that the state could inflict.1 Domitian 
claimed for himself the titles God and Lord. The writer, 
who was evidently of Jewish race, falls back on the obscure 
and turgid imagery of Jewish apocalypse to convey to his 
readers his own confidence in God and Christ. On earth 
Cesar reigned, seemingly omnipotent, but in heaven was 
their mighty and exalted Lord. He knew His people’s 
needs, and would reward with every blessing of God’s 
Kingdom those who were faithful unto death. He is the 
Holy and the True, the First and the Last, the Word of God, 
God’s Son. To Him are ascribed titles which to Jews 
suggested God Himself. He is the Ancient of Days, the 
King of Kings and Lord of Lords. The throne of the universe 
is the throne of God and of the Lamb. 

It is a book easy to criticise in times of security and 
peace. The God whom he proclaims, although called the 
Father of Christ the Son, seems often more allied to the 
grim God of Jewish apocalypse than to the God of Jesus,? 
whilst Christ the Lamb is not only the Lamb that hath 
been slain from the foundation of the world, He is also the 


1 T assume that the book was written in Domitian’s reign by a member of the 
Johannine circle in Asia Minor, though not by the author of 1 John and the Fourth 
Gospel. 

* It does not seem a sufficient explanation to say with Charles that the Christian 
elements in the writer’s doctrine of God “ are not dwelt upon because they can all 
be inferred from what the Book teaches regarding the Son ” (J'he Revelation, I. cix f.) 
The writer, unlike St. Paul, is not concerned to show that whatever be the troubles 
of their lot, Christians could be sure of God’s love through His gift of Christ (cp. 
Rom. viii. 32-9). It is God’s future work of vindication and of vengeance that he 
emphasises, 


11] THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 59 


warrior Messiah of some late Jewish hopes. Its very 
inconsistencies increase the interest of the book. There 
could be no more convincing witness to the faith in Christ 
of the early Church than that which this writer gives. This 
Jewish Christian, steeped in the incongruous thought of 
Jewish apocalypse, and accepting its stern monotheism, 
is yet compelled by his faith in Christ to ascribe to Him 
divine titles, to associate Him with God in the rule of the 
universe, and to see in His power and love the one hope 
of a Church threatened with complete destruction. 


The First Epistle of St. John. 


Although the First Epistle of St. John may be later 
than the Fourth Gospel, it will be convenient to deal with 
the Epistle first, as the writer’s doctrine of Christ can more 
easily be discovered in this succinct and vivid summary. 

Already some who claimed the Christian name had 
attempted to form an amalgam of Christianity and paganism 
which made the Incarnation unreal, and led to a loveless 
intellectualism, irreconcilable with the moral ideals of 
Christianity. The writer is concerned, at once, to confirm 
his readers in the true Christian faith, and to provide an 
“apparatus of tests”? by which they could judge of their 
own Christian standing. 

The Epistle begins with a majestic statement of the 
disclosure in history of the Word, the Logos of Life, which 
was with the Father, and has been manifested unto men. 
The “lie” which the Epistle was concerned to attack was 
the denial of the identity of Jesus and the Christ. It was 
no longer the Church’s claim that Jesus was the Jewish 
Messiah that was at issue. It was the relation of the 
heavenly Christ to the earthly Jesus.*, The teachers whom 

1 See Prof. Brooke’s adaptation of Haering’s analysis of the Epistle (The Johan- 
nine Epistles, pp. xxxiv—vi). So Law called his fine exposition of the Epistle, T’he 


Tests of Life. 
* Cp. the views of Cerinthus as given by Irenewus, Against Heresies, I. 26, 1. 


60 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [1 


this writer has in mind seem to be those who taught that 
the heavenly Christ, though associated with the human 
Jesus, was not truly incarnate in Him. ‘The writer re- 
pudiates this view with a vehemence which shows that it 
contradicted the inmost experience of his life. Their error 
was the error of Anti-Christ. It involved the denial not 
of the Son alone, but of the Father. God’s Fatherhood in 
the Christian sense is credible only through a belief in a 
true incarnation ; and so to deny the Son is to lose the 
Father.t Jesus is ‘‘ Christ come in the flesh.’ It is the 
man ‘‘ who confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, who 
dwells in God, and in whom God dwells.”? The same 
truth seems to be expressed in the much-discussed passage, 
v. 4-6. The faith which has overcome the world is a faith 
in Jesus as the Son of God. ‘This is He that came by 
~ water and blood ; not with water only, but with the water. 
and with the blood.’ Like Cerinthus, these false teachers 
had apparently taught that the Son of God-descended on 
Jesus at the Baptism, and thus came “ with the water.” 
He had not come “‘ with the blood,’’ for He had departed 
from the human Jesus before His passion. Thus to deny 
that the Divine had shared in the shame and anguish of the 
Cross seemed to the writer to take from the Gospel both 
its meaning and its power. The faith which could deliver 
from the tyranny of the world, must be a faith in a Son 
of God who had met on the Cross our deepest needs. It 
is in the Cross of Christ that he sees love’s perfect expression. 
We know what love is by this; ‘‘ He laid down His life 
for us.”’* And the self-sacrifice of the Son is the manifesta- 
tion of the Father’s love. We know what love is by the 
Father’s gift, as well as by the Son’s self-dedication. 
** Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved 
us, and sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins.” 


tat, 20,121, 2 iv. 2. 8 iv. 15. 
* iii. 16. The words “ of God” of the A.V. are a gloss. There was no need for 
the writer to say who the “ He” was. 


11] THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 61 


Such love is meant to enkindle ours. ‘“‘If God so loved 
us, we ought also to love one another.’’! 

Thus, in this writer, eternal reality and historical fact 
are inextricably combined, and the profoundest truths are 
related to the plain demands of the Christian life. 


The Fourth Gospel. 


We find a similar interpretation of Christianity in the 
Fourth Gospel, in which the story of the incarnate Son is 
retold in order that its readers “‘ may believe that Jesus 
is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing they may 
have life in His name.’ 

It is as the Son of God that Jesus is in this Gospel 
primarily depicted. He alone truly knows of God, and His 
witness to the Father is a witness of what He Himself 
has seen and heard.? He does more than bring to men 
a revelation of God. He is Himself that revelation. To 
know Him is to know the Father ; to see Him is to see the 
Father.* All that He does is done in dependence on His 
Father. His “‘ meat” it is to do the will of Him that sent 
Him.® God has put all things into His hand, and to refuse 
to accept His message is to miss eternal life.® 

In reflection on events long past, distinctions of time 
are inevitably obliterated, and it is thus not surprising 
that in this, the latest of the Gospels, the development in 
Christ’s own conception of His mission and in men’s 
recognition of Him, is forgotten or ignored. At the very 
beginning of His ministry, He was known by some to be 
the Messiah, and at His baptism was proclaimed by John 
as ““the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the 
world.’ Yet it is a misrepresentation of the facts to describe 
this Gospel’s portrait of Jesus as a mere Christophany, 

1 iv. 10, 11. ib. oars 3 


* iii. 11 and 32, Cp. viii. 26, 38, 40, xv. 16. 
xiv, 1; Oe S iv. 34, iii, 36 f, 


62 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [11 


Faithfully this Gospel narrates His human weakness, His 
weariness at the well, His sorrow and vexation at Lazarus’s 
death, and His thirst upon the Cross, Nor is it true to say 
that the evangelist depicts Jesus as immune from inner 
conflict, praying only for didactic purposes, Himself 
immune from human need. His deep emotion at the visit 
of the Greeks is an indication of the strain with which He 
accepted the burden of the Cross. His soul was troubled; . 
and it was by prayer He gained the calm courage needed 
to endure the Cross and so to consummate His work and 
do the Father’s will. Much as in this Gospel His power 
is emphasised, it is not an independent power. The signs 
He works are in answer to His prayers to God.? Of Himself, 
He can do nothing ; His works are those which the Father 
gave Him to do.® 

Thus the divine Sonship of Jesus denotes in this Gospel 
the most complete dependence upon God, and the most 
intimate communion with Him. This filial relation, because 
perfect, was unique. He is the only-begotten Son, and the 
Gospel represents Him as knowing in His incarnate life 
of His pre-existence with the Father, of the glory which 
He had before the world was.4 The gift to the world of 
His only-begotten Son is the supreme proof of the love 
of God. The Son came that men might not be lost, but 
have eternal life.’ To all men’s needs He is adequate. He 
is the Light of the world ; in Him is the Life of men. He 
is the world’s Saviour, the Good Shepherd laying down His 
life for the sheep. He loves His own to the end, and gives 
them the commandment that, as He loved them, so shall 
they love one another. 

In this Gospel, Jesus is presented less in the setting 
of the Messianic hope than through terms like Light and 
Life and Love, which are intelligible everywhere at the 
higher levels of religious thought. The expression ‘‘ Son 


1 xii. 23-7. eg. x1 41; sv. 19, 36. 
* xvii. 5, cp. viii. 58. § iii, 16 f. 


11] THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 63 


of Man” is indeed retained, but has largely lost its 
eschatological colouring. In the historic Jesus is manifest 
the eternal Son, whom the writer knew not only from his 
own or another’s reminiscence, but through his insight 
into Christ’s significance gained through his share in the 
Church’s experience of the risen Lord. 

We have left till last our reference to the Prologue, for 
it is difficult to speak with any certainty of its import. 
It would appear that the writer sought in these opening 
words, by calling Christ the Logos, to express through a 
category, intelligible both to Jews and Greeks, the doctrine 
of the divine Son unfolded in the main body of the Gospel. 
The majestic words with which the writer begins the Gospel 
would have occasioned no surprise. The idea of a divine 
Logos was familiar in many circles of contemporary thought. 
What was strange and startling was the claim that the 
Logos became flesh ; that His glory had been beheld on - 
earth, “the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, 
full of grace and truth.” ‘‘ No man has.seen God at any 
time’”’; with that most of his time would agree. “‘ An 
only begotten God! who lies upon the bosom of the Father ” 
has revealed Him to men—that it was the Gospel’s purpose 
to prove. 

The origin of the Fourth Gospel and the derivation of its 
teaching is still an unsolved mystery. In the brief limits 
of this chapter, it is impossible even to state the problem 
of this most baffling of New Testament books. In our 
study of St. Paul, we found that the difficulty of inter- 
pretation was largely one of adequate translation, and 
in this we were helped by his own vivid portraiture of his 
spiritual experience, by the account he gives us of his 
opponents’ views, and by the distinctive nature of the 
categories he employs. For the interpretation of this 
Gospel we have no such aids. Obviously it sprang from 


1 Reading povoyevs eds instead of the 6 povoryevis ulés of the received text. 
The evidence for this reading is fully set out in Hort’s T'wo Dissertations, 


64 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS {11 


an experience as distinctive as St. Paul’s, but of its author 
we know nothing. The attempts which have been made 
to indicate his polemic aims are little more than ingenious 
guesswork. Nor are the categories he employs distinctive 
enough to reveal their derivation. Light, Life and Love 
are terms which are the monopoly of no race and no 
religion, and even the term Logos is of quite uncertain 
origin. It has been derived not only from Philo, the 
Alexandrian Jew, but from the Wisdom literature of the 
Old Testament,” from the Memra of the Targums? and from 
the Hermetic literature of Egyptian theosophy.* It is 
probable that this common view is right, and that the 
writer’s use of the term Logos is most nearly connected 
with the Alexandrian Judaism of Philo, but it is unsafe 
to assume that the writer got there his thought of Christ. 
It is by no means easy to determine what Philo meant 


1 Thus the Prologue can equally well be interpreted as a polemic against Judaism, 
or against the half-pagan Christianity of the Gnostics. If the first, then its opening 
words by their similarity to the first words of Genesis involve the claim that there 
was now to be presented a religion, new and yet connected with one who was the 
agent of the world’s creation, a religion which surpassed and superseded the law of 
Moses, a religion to which John the Baptist, who in some circles was apparently 
unduly honoured, was a witness, important only as the herald of the Christ. If 
the second, the opening words are intended to deny that many xons had been 
effective in the world’s creation. The Logos was the sole agent of God, and against 
the view that Christ was not truly incarnate, the Prologue goes on to affirm that the 
Logos became flesh. It may well be that the Prologue was designed to serve both 
these polemic aims. 

2 So especially Dr. Rendel Harris, who sees the ultimate source of this conception 
in the description of Wisdom in Prov. viii. 22-30, and holds that the Prologue 
“is constructed out of the material furnished by the Praises of Wisdom” (Z'he 
Origin of the Prologue to St. John, p. 18). 

* This, the view of Westcott, is strongly advocated by Dr. Burney, who denies 
that the use of the Logos has anything to do with Alexandrian speculation, and 
claims to have proved that it comes from the Palestinian Jewish thought repre- 
sented by the Z'argums, the popular Aramaic translations of the sacred Hebrew 
text (The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 28-43). This view is strongly 
combated by Dr. G. F. Moore in his important article on Intermediaries in 
Jewish Thought (Harvard Theological Review, 1922, pp. 41-85). Dr. Moore holds 
that the phrase, memra of Jahveh, is “‘ a cireumlocution for God, the Lord or the like, 
introduced out of motives of reverence.” ‘‘ Nowhere in these Targums is it a 
‘ being’ of any kind or in any sense.” 

‘ So Reitzenstein, Poimandres, pp. 244-8. The few phrases he adduces are far 
more impressive out of their context than in, and we know so little of the develop- 
ment of this conglomerate literature, that his explanation seems to be an attempt 
to explain the unknown by the more unknown. 


1] THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 65 


by the Logos and the familiar quotations from him to be 
found in most textbooks on this Gospel are misleading, if, 
through being taken out of their context, they are read, 
not as poetic fancies, but as formal definitions. Whatever 
else is uncertain, this much at least seems clear : The Logos 
of Philo’s speculation could not have ‘‘ become flesh.’ 
The doctrine of the Incarnation of the Logos would have 
seemed to Philo, not only strange, but beyond belief or 
thought.} Y 

It is difficult to regard the Gospel as a Logos-idyll, an 
imaginative work, owing something to the Synoptic 
tradition and to Pauline theology, but deriving its con- 
ception of Christ primarily from Philo’s doctrine of the 
Logos. The Prologue seems less a programme than a 
preface. Some term was needed to link the teaching of 
this Gospel with current thought. To us the term, Logos, 
has an unfamiliar sound, but in that age no term could 
serve so well to win for this Gospel sympathetic interest. 
‘Logos’? was not only the ordinary term for word, 
it was also a term familiar both to liberal Jews and 
educated Greeks, as a description of a divine power 


1 Philo’s use of the term Logos is fully discussed in Drummond, Philo Judeus, Il., 
pp. 156-273. Drummond denied that Philo thought of the Logos as being in any 
sense a person, and holds that “ from first to last, the Logos is the Thought of God, 
dwelling subjectively in the infinite Mind, planted out and made objective in the 
universe” (op. cit., p. 273). Dr. Kennedy holds that “‘ The Logos-hypothesis 
itself, as it appears in Philo, is full of confusion. This is no doubt partly due to 
its composition from heterogeneous elements. . . . In part it depends on the 
fluctuating boundary in ancient thought between personality and personification, 
and on Philo’s own tendency to glide from what he conceived as truth to symbols 
of truth. To some extent it results from his failure in constructive power.” Al- 
though he thus recognises a measure of personification, he concludes his discussion 
with the emphatic statement that “‘ one aspect of the question is not open to dispute. 
To Philo, as to any of his pagan contemporaries, it would have appeared an inversion 
of all values, whether religious or metaphysical, that the Evangelist should have 
dared the tremendous assertion: ‘ The Logos became flesh, and dwelt among us’ ”’ 
(Philo’s Contribution to Religton, pp. 162-3, 177.) 

? This view finds cautious expression in E. F. Scott, The Fourth Gospel?, pp. 163- 
75, and in Dr. Inge, The Theology of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge Biblical Essays, 
pp. 252-88). Thus Prof. Scott says, ‘‘ Jesus was the Light of the world and the 
Life-Giver, because He was Himself the Logos, one in essence with God.” Would it 
not be truer to say that the Evangelist called Jesus the Logos, because He had first 
found Him to be the Light of the world and the Life-giver ? 


E 


66 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS {xr 


or force mediating between God and man. But, before 
the Prologue is finished, the writer substitutes for the 
idea of the Logos that of the divine Son, incarnate as 
the historic Jesus, and it is this which dominates his 
Gospel. 

It is not enough then to say ‘“‘ Philo” to explain the 
relation of the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel to the Jesus 
of history. We have a better summary of the Gospel’s 
message in John ii. 16 than in the opening verses of the 
Prologue. It is the Gospel of the love of God, manifested 
in the gift to the world of His Son, that men, believing in 
Him, might have eternal life. Such a message is far 
removed from the ‘“‘ Jesusism’’ of some modern critics, 
but between the Jesus of Matthew xi. 25-30 and the Jesus 
of the Fourth Gospel there seems no such inherent con- 
tradiction as to require us to suppose that it is due to alien 
influences. This Gospel has as its theme the Church’s 
living Lord, whom the writer knew through his own rich 
and distinctive faith. But the living Lord he served is one 
with the Jesus of history, and we may well believe that 
this great classic of Christian experience has as its founda- 
tion genuine reminiscences, whether of the evangelist 
himself, or of a “‘ beloved disciple’? whose pupil he had 
been.! It is the Jesus of history with which this Gospel 
deals, but the Jesus of history, presented no longer in the 
transient symbols of Jewish apocalypse, but as the Son 
of God and the Saviour of the world. 

If the term Logos had little influence on the Evangelist’s 
own thought of Christ, its use in this authoritative, and 


1 Dr. Streeter suggests that the Evangelist was the Elder John, who as a boy 
saw the Lord, and was possibly in the crowd at the Crucifixion, and holds that the 
Beloved Disciple was the Apostle John “‘transfigured into the ideal disciple ” 
(The Four Gospels, pp. 427-61). For the view that the Evangelist was a pupil of 
John the Apostle, “ the Beloved Disciple,” see Stanton, The Gospels as Historical 
Documents, III., pp. 134-46. Dr. Garvie argues that the ‘‘ Beloved Disciple’ was 
not John the Apostle, but a young disciple of Jesus, outside the Apostolic circle, 
a Judean connected with the family of the High Priest, and that it is his remin- 
iscences which the Evangelist, his pupil, utilises (The Beloved Disciple, pp. 202-58). 


11] THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 67 


later canonical, Gospel was of decisive importance in the 
development of Christian Theology. In itself it was only 
one of several tentative terms used to interpret the Church’s 
faith in Christ, and, apart from its connexion with Jesus, 
would have no special significance for us to-day. But it 
was precisely the term needed to express the meaning of 
Jesus at a time when Christianity was becoming pre- 
dominantly a Gentile religion. The terms Son of David, 
Son of Man, belonged to the world of Jewish hopes and 
loyalties. The title Son of God was all too familiar to 
pagans, and could by them be understood in a pagan sense, 
as if Jesus were the Son of God, as many were believed 
to have been the sons of Zeus. The term Logos was, at 
once, more intelligible and less perilous. Its use by Philo, 
the Jew, was later to help in the defence of Christianity 
against the Jewish accusation that the Christians had two 
gods. More important still, its association with Greek 
philosophy made possible the naturalisation of Christianity 
in that Grzeco-Oriental world in which Christianity had by 
now to live or die. The term, in itself, provided no solution 
of the problem of the Incarnation. It was rather an 
idiomatic translation of the problem into Greek. Such a 
translation was necessary if Christianity was to become 
more than a Jewish sect. It brought with it many perils ; 
it led to inadequate views of Christ, and to subversions 
of Christianity more dangerous than any that could have 
come from Jewish thought. But it put Christianity into 
relation with contemporary culture, made it appear 
as a native, and not an exotic, religion, and made 
possible its statement in categories through which 
alone it could become intelligible and attractive to 
the non-Jewish world. The treasure of the Gospel is 
always in an earthen vessel, and in the Greek world 

1 As Dr. Glover puts it, “‘ If Christianity had depended on the Logos, it would 
have followed the Logos to the limbo whither went Alon, and Aporrhoia and 


Spermaticos Logos,” Conflict of Religions, pp. 303-4, and, as Dr. Rendel Harris puts 
it, we do not sing, ‘‘ How sweet the name of Logos sounds.” 


68 NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATIONS [11 


this earthen vessel was now to be of Greek, not Jewish, 
manufacture,? 


1 Here, too, an illustration from the modern mission field may be permissible. 
The early Protestant missionaries in India rigidly opposed any attempt to interpret 
Christianity in terms of Hindu thought. In consequence, Christianity remained 
orthodox (by Western standards) but foreign and unintelligible. If, like the 
Evangelist, they had ventured to impress into the service of Christ a pagan term, 
and spoken of the Incarnation as an avatdra, doubtless there would have been 
Indian heresies, but by now the Indian Church would probably be less alien and 
exotic, and better able to formulate its own theology. Itis notin biology alone_that 
life means response to environment. 


IIT 
THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES 


Ir is difficult to avoid a sense of bathos as we turn from 
the classic presentation of Christianity in the New Testament 
to the writers of the post-Apostolic Church. Such dis- 
appointment is natural, but unwarranted. To understand 
these early writers, we need to think of the great churches 
of the mission field to-day. In Protestant missions, converts 
are taught at once to read, that they may study the New 
Testament and base on it their life. Yet how little of its 
deepest truths do they, for the most part, understand.+ 
For many, religion has meant the fear of demons; to the 
more intellectual of them it has meant a quest for redemp- 
tion, but redemption, not primarily from sin, but from 
weakness, or from the transitoriness of life. Christianity 
is strange and new. They have to naturalise it to their 
needs. Inevitably they find in it a “teaching” to be 
learnt, and a “law” to be obeyed. In the life of Jesus 
they take, for the most part, little interest. Why should 
they ? Pagans, as a rule, are not curious about the legends 
of their gods and, unless they are philosophers, do not 
trouble to relate their own special God to the ultimate 
reality whom dimly they recognise as the highest Deity. 
If this is true in mission fields to-day, where the New 
Testament is widely circulated, and where there are 
missionaries representing a more mature tradition, it is 

1 The parallels between the faith of the Early Church and that of modern 
missionary Churches is well presented in Campbell N. Moody, The Mind of the 


Early Converts. He writes of China, but many of bis bonnie would apply to 
the great Mass movement Churches of South India. 


69 


70 THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES [x12 


not surprising that in the Early Church, when the Apostles, 
the ‘‘ missionaries,’ were dead, and the New Testament 
writings hard to procure, Christianity was often presented 
in a way which seems to modern readers imperfect and 
pedestrian. It was not by a coherent Theology that 
Christianity won its early triumphs. It was by a sense 
of new power, and of victory over devils, a new spirit of 
brotherhood and love, and a higher morality often inter- 
preted as obedience to a new “‘ law.” | 
Such we shall find are in general the characteristics of 
the post-Apostolic writers of the first and second centuries. 
They fall into three groups: (1) the so-called Apostolic 
Fathers, the leaders of the Church in its first immaturity ; 
(2) the Apologists, who repelled the attacks of a revived and 
aggressive paganism ; and (3) the Anti-Gnostic Fathers, who 
sought to defend the Church from the subtler peril of paganism 
within its own borders, and who, in doing this, were com- 
pelled to work out in this struggle some of the implicates of 
the Christian faith, so that, by the end of the second century, 
there were already the beginnings of a Church Theology. 


I.—Tuer Apostotic Farumrs (A.D. 90-140) 
Clement of Rome. 


It is possible that the earliest writing of this group is 
the Epistle to the Corinthians, which tradition assigns to 
Clement of Rome. It is an occasional writing, and makes 
little contribution to our subject. Like most of these 
Apostolic Fathers, Clement is imitative not creative, and, 
even where he copies Paul’s language, fails to enter into 
its deeper meaning. He cannot free himself from legalism. 
The death of Christ is a “‘ pattern’ of humility for us to 
imitate.1 The ‘‘ blood of Christ” has its value, because 
it has “‘ won for the whole world the grace of repentance.’’? 

1 §16, 


*§7. Translations from these Fathers are from Harmer’s one vol. edit. of 
Lightfoot’s Texts and Translations. 


IIT] THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS 71 


The whole Epistle is full of Christian teaching, but of 
Christ’s person it says little. Christ is “our High Priest 
and Guardian.”! In view of the later development of 
Latin thought, it is of interest to notice the emphasis which 
this Bishop of Rome places on the humility of Christ. 
‘ The sceptre [of the majesty] of God, even our Lord Jesus 
Christ, came not in the pomp of arrogance or of pride, 
though He might have done so, but in lowliness of mind, 
according as the Holy Spirit spake concerning Him... . 
If the Lord was thus lowly in mind, what should we do, 
who through Him have been brought under the yoke of 
His grace ?’’? 


The Epistle of ‘‘ Barnabas,” 


Less attractive than this sober epistle is the Hpistle of 
Barnabas. To its writer, the Christian life is one long 
conflict with ‘‘ the Black One,” ‘‘ the Active One,’’ who has 
the authority in these evil days. Yet like modern converts 
who have lived in fear of devils, if he is sure of the power 
of the Evil One, he is as sure of the power of Christ. The 
Lord Jesus appeared in person that ‘“‘ He might redeem 
out of darkness our hearts which had already been paid 
over to death.”* Of Paul’s conception of vivifying faith, 
he seems to have no conception. It is through threats 
of the dreadful consequences of the way of the Black One 
that he seeks to make his readers keep the ordinances of 
the Lord.® 


The Shepherd of Hermas. 


The Shepherd of Hermas is a book written to summon 
to repentance the members of the Roman Church. It is 
possible, the writer holds, for men to do more than their 
duty. ‘If thou do any good thing outside the command- 
ment of God, thou shalt win for thyself more exceeding 
glory, and shalt be more glorious in the sight of God than 


1 § 64, 2 § 16, 2 § 20, § 2. ‘$14, 5 §§ 20, 21. 


72 THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES o, \faet 


thou wouldest otherwise have been.’ These words occur 
in the exposition of a parable in which the divinity of our 
‘Lord Himself is apparently ascribed to His supererogatory 
virtue. He speaks of a certain man “ who had an estate, 
and many slaves” and chose one of his slaves to be in 
charge of a vineyard and to fence it around. But the slave 
not only fenced it round, he weeded it also. And the 
master was so pleased with this extra service that, with the 
consent of his beloved son, he made this slave joint heir. In 
the interpretation of this parable, “‘ the estate ’’ is declared 
to be the world. ‘‘ The lord of the estate’ is God, the 
Creator ; the slave elevated to be heir is the Son of God ; 
whilst in the Old Latin version, the son is declared to be 
the Holy Spirit. Yet later we are told that the “ Holy 
pre-existent Spirit, which created the whole creation ” 
was made by God ‘“‘ to dwell in flesh,’’ and it was because 
this flesh ‘‘ lived honourably in chastity, and had laboured 
with the Spirit, and had co-operated with it in everything ”’ 
that God “‘ chose it as a partner with the Holy Spirit.’’? 
It is hard to say exactly what the parable means. Possibly 
the writer did not know himself. To him it probably 
sufficed that the parable served to illustrate a point and 
interest his readers. It is customary to speak of this 
writer’s ‘‘ Adoptianist ’’ Christology. But it seems useless 
to attempt to define the ‘‘ Christology ”’ of a writer of this 
kind. More significant is the legalism of this austere and 
earnest man. We seem far away, indeed, from St. Paul’s 
proclamation of God’s free grace. 

1 Similitudes, V. 3. 

2 Similitudes, V. 1-5. Bousset, who holds that Harnack over-emphasises the 
Adoptianist element in early Christology, rejects the words of the Old Latin, ‘* The 
Son is the Holy Spirit’ as a gloss, and believes that even here we have a “ pneu- 
matic,” not an “‘ adoptianist ” Christology. We may, at least, agree with him that 
“the assertions of this book can scarcely be used for the history of Christology ” 


(Kyrios Christos*, p. 267). Even one so respectful to antiquity as Dr. Gore speaks 
of Hermas as “ a pious but somewhat stupid prophet ” (Belief in Christ, p. 200). 


TIT] THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS 73 


The Epistle to Diognetus. 


It is a pleasure to turn from this fanciful book to the 
Epistle to Diognetus, an early apology, addressed apparently 
to a pagan of high rank. Christians have had committed 
to them ‘‘no earthly discovery,’ no “dispensation of 
human mysteries.” ‘The Almighty Creator of the 
Universe, the Invisible God Himself from heaven, planted 
among men the truth, and the holy teaching which sur- 
passeth the wit of man, and fixed it firmly in their hearts, 
not as any man might imagine, by sending (to mankind) 
a subaltern, or angel, or ruler, or one of those who have 
been entrusted with the dispensations in heaven, but the 
very Artificer and Creator of the Universe Himself, by 
whom He made the heavens. . . . Him He sent unto them. 
Was He sent, think you, as any man might suppose, to 
establish a sovereignty, to inspire fear and terror? Not 
so. But in gentleness and meekness has He sent Him, as 
a king might send his son who isa king, He sent Him, as 
sending God; He sent Him, as [a man] unto men; He 
sent Him as Saviour, as using persuasion, not force: for 
force is no attribute of God.’’! And to this writer, God is 
the God of Christ. God “hated us not, neither rejected 
us, nor bore us malice, but was long-suffering and patient, 
and in pity for us took upon Himself our sins, and Himself 
parted with His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy for 
the lawless, the guileless for the evil, the just for the 
unjust, the incorruptible for the corruptible, the immortal 
for the mortal.’ In this Epistle God is indeed “ the 
Father,” and Christ “‘the only begotten Son,’ ‘the 
Word, who was from the beginning.”* In an apology of 
this kind, theological interests can only be secondary, but 
nowhere in these writers have we so clear a reflection of 
Apostolic faith and insight, and it is long before we find 


187. 2 §9, 2 § 10, «gl. 


life. Christ’s manhood was not a mere 


74 THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES [111 


again in Christian literature the idea of God so completely 
Christianised. 


The Letters of Ignatius. 


Of these writings none have aroused so much interest 
in modern times as the seven letters of Ignatius, written 
when he was on the way to martyrdom. Ignatius’ style 
is often violent, and he refers to the sufferings he will have 
to undergo in a boastful, exuberant way, very different 
from that of Paul, to whose words he makes frequent 
reference. But, if Ignatius lacks Paul’s strength, he shares 
in his devotion to our Lord. Jesus Christ is to him “ my 
God.” ‘‘Come fire and cross and grapplings with wild 
beasts, cuttings and manglings, wrenching of bones, hacking 
of limbs, crushings of my whole body, come cruel tortures 
of the Devil to assail me. Only let it be mine to attain 
unto Jesus Christ . .. Him I seek, who died on our 
behalf; Him I desire, who rose again. ... Permit me 
to be an imitator of the passion of my God.”! Christ has 
brought both knowledge and immortality. He is “‘ the 
Word (Logos) that proceedeth from silence,”’ making God 
manifest to men.” He is “ the one only physician, of flesh 
and of spirit, generate and ingenerate, God in man, true 
Life in death, Son of Mary and Son of God, first passible, 
and then impassible, Jesus Christ our Lord.’’® 

In spite of his use of phrases like ‘“‘ the blood of God,”’ 
Ignatius asserts strongly the reality of Christ’s human 
‘* semblance,’ as 
the Docetists taught. He bids his readers “‘ be deaf when 


1 To the Romans, §§ 5, 6. * To the Magnesians, § 8. 

* To the Ephesians, §7. For “ generate and ingenerate,” i.e. begotten as regards 
His human nature, and unbegotten as regards His deity, the later Theology would 
have said, “ create and increate,” i.e. yevnrds and dyévyros instead of yevynrés 
and dayévynros, for the Son was begotten (yevynrés) even in His Godhead. See 
Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, II. I., pp. 49 and 90-4. For ‘“‘ impassible’” we might 
translate “* apathetic.” We have here the Greek view, which later became nor- 
mative in the Church, that the Godhead cannot feel or suffer, a view which seems 
hard to reconcile with what Christ taught us of God’s love. 


111] THE APOLOGISTS 75 


any man speaketh to you apart from Jesus Christ, who was | 


of the race of David, who was the Son of Mary, who was | 


truly born and ate and drank, was truly persecuted under 
Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified, and died in the sight 
of those in heaven and those on earth and those under the 


earth. ... But if it were as certain persons who are 
godless, that is, unbelievers, say, that He suffered only in 
semblance . . . why am I in bonds ?’”’! 


So, to Ignatius, Christ was truly God and truly man. ' 


He is ‘‘ the Eternal, the Invisible, who became visible for 
our sake, the Impalpable, the Impassible, who suffered 
for our sake, who endured in all ways for our sake.’ 
We have in him clear traces of Pauline and Johannine 
thoughts, and, with these, we find tendencies more Greek 
than Apostolic. There is a new emphasis on incorrup- 
tibility. The bread of the Sacrament is itself ‘‘ a medicine 
of immortality, and the antidote that we should not die, 
but live for ever in Jesus Christ.’ Ignatius thus becomes 
important for our study, not only as the imitator of the 
Apostles, but as the precursor of the distinctively Greek 
Theology. 


II.—Tur APo.ocists 


The latter part of the second century was a time of 
acute crisis in the Church’s history. The Church was by 
now almost entirely Gentile. Jerusalem itself was a heathen 
city. Its bishops henceforth were Gentiles, as were its 
members, for into Jerusalem no circumcised person was 
allowed to enter. Jewish Christianity by now had rapidly 
declined in influence and importance.* The close associa- 
tion of Christian and Gentile thought brought to the Church 


1 To the Trallians, §§ 9, 10. * To Polycarp, § 3. 8 To the Ephesians, § 20. 

* Kidd, A History of the Church, I., pp. 88, 90. Justin Martyr naively speaks of 
Jewish Christians ‘‘ choosing to live with the Christians,” and expresses the hope 
that, although they “ observe the legal dispensation along with their confession of 
God in Christ, they shall probably be saved,” Dialogue with Trypho, 47. 'Transla- 
tions for the rest of this chapter are from the Ante-Nicene Library. 


oan, 


76 THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES [111 


problems far more serious than any it had faced. To many 
of the better educated Gentile Christians, the Christian 
Gospel seemed, in its ordinary presentation, to be un- 
interesting and provincial. Like the cultivated pagans 
of the time, they too believed that knowledge (gnosis) was 
superior to faith, and, within the Church, a half-Christian 
and half-pagan Gnosticism exercised over many a fascina- 
tion which menaced the very existence of Christianity. 
It was a time of external peril. Paganism had experienced 
a great revival, and the deadliest foe of the Church was no 
longer a crude polytheism, but a refined pantheism which 
was ready to include within itself all cults and faiths, but 
was bitterly hostile to Christianity, because of what 
appeared to be its monstrous claim to be the one true 
religion, claiming from all men an exclusive allegiance. 
Before we pass to the Church’s struggle with Gnosticism, 
it is necessary to say something of the presentation of 
Christianity by the Apologists, whose task it was to defend 
the Church against external attack and to win a hearing 
for the Christian message. 

In an age when philosophy was held in high esteem, 
the Apologists naturally depicted Christianity as the 
highest philosophy, embodying all that was true in other 
systems, and itself of universal and permanent worth ; 
and, unlike other philosophies, adapted to the needs, not 
only of “ philosophers and scholars,” but also of “‘ artisans 
and people entirely uneducated,” who learn through Christ 
‘to despise glory, and fear, and death.”! These Apologists 
had not yet learnt to Christianise their thought of God. 
Like other educated men of their time, they believed that 
God was incomprehensible, nameless, without desire or 
feeling, and so their theology was inevitably one of transition 
and of compromise. It was hard to relate their ‘‘ Philos- 
ophers’ God” to the historic Christ. In a pagan world, 
“Son ” suggested crude ideas of divine generation. The 


. 1 Justin, Apology, II. 10. 


IIT] THE APOLOGISTS 77 


Apologists found the category they needed in the term 
‘Word ”’ (Logos), a term consecrated by its use in the 
Fourth Gospel, and current in esteemed philosophies of 
their age. All God’s activities are mediated by the Word. 
The Word was pre-existent. The manifestations of God 
in the Old Testament were really manifestations of the 
Word.! Not the Old Testament alone, but Greek Philosophy 
bore witness to Him. Sometimes Justin claims that Plato 
borrowed from Moses. It was thus that Plato prophesied 
of Christ’s Cross, for he learnt from Moses that ‘‘ the power 
next to the first God was placed cross-wise in the universe.’’* 
At other times Justin sees in the truths of Greek Philosophy 
the work of ‘‘ the seed of the Logos.”’? In Christ was the 
whole of the Word, the Logos.* In this way, Christians 
could claim that all truth was theirs, and Christ could be 
related, not only to Jewish, but to pagan thought. 

With an inadequate thought of God, it was inevitable 
that there should be an inadequate thought of Christ. 
Justin tells us indeed that Christ has a place ‘“‘ second to 
the unchangeable and eternal God, the creator of all.” 
He is ‘‘ the Son of the true God Himself.’’® He is ‘‘ distinct 
from Him who made all things—numerically, I mean, not 
in will.”® But Justin, and the other Apologists of this 
period, although they give to Christ an exalted place, 
appear to have entered but a little way into that classic 
experience of Christ which we have studied in Paul and 
John. They find in Him, not so much their Redeemer, as 
the teacher of a perfect philosophy. Christianity is “truth.” 
It is a new law, obedience to which brings incorruptibility .. 
These Apologists show but little interest in the historic 
Jesus, It is the pre-existent Word, the Logos, which fills’ 
their thoughts. And the place assigned to the divine Word 
is far less than that given by Paul or John. Christ is not 


1 Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 127. 2 Apology, I. 60. 
* Op. cit., 11. 8. ‘ Op. cit., IL. 10. 
5 Op. cit., I. 13. ® Dialogue with Trypho, 56. 


78 THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES [111 


one with God. He is another God, inferior to the highest 
God.t Such a criticism, though just, seems too severe. 
A man brought up to believe in the one ineffable God of 
speculation, and in the multiplicity of gods of popular 
religion, will, if he become a Christian, readily put Christ 
in the place of all the gods. Not easily will he learn to 
Christianise his thought of the highest God, and so, almost 
inevitably, though he thinks of Christ as an exalted God, 
highest of all personal beings, he will fail to relate Him 
to the supreme and unknowable God, in whom as a Christian 
he still believes. The interpretation of our Lord as the 
“Word” did not then, in itself, solve the problem of His 
relationship to God. It rather gave the form in which the 
problem would have later to be faced. Henceforth, for 
gain or loss, the Logos doctrine dominates Christology. 


TiI.—Tuer Anti-GNostic FATHERS 


The gravest peril to Christianity came, not from paganism 
without the Church, but from paganism within. Greek 
and Oriental thought had coalesced and, as usual, popular 
polytheism led in its reflective form to a comprehensive 
pantheism very attractive to many minds.* Such a 
philosophy seemed to many the best “science” of the 
age, and then, as always, there were those within the 
Church who, overawed by the Time-Spirit, were ready to 
surrender to a dominant philosophy much of the heritage 
of the Gospel. And so there arose Christian Gnosticism. 
It was no new phenomenon. The Greeco-Oriental dualism, 
with its breach between the material and the spiritual, had, 
almost from the first preaching of Christianity in the Gentile 
world, made the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation 
seem to many crude and puerile, good enough for ignorant 

1 So Loofs, Dogmengeschichte*, p. 129. 

* The same confusion is to be seen in many a modern convert from paganism. 

* This refined paganism can be most conveniently studied in the Hermetic 


literature, on which see Reitzenstein’s Poimandres and Mead’s Thrice-Greatest 
Hermes. 


111] THE ANTI-GNOSTIC FATHERS 79 


Christians, but quite inadequate for ‘‘ Gnostics,”’ “‘ Knowing 
Ones,”’ who desired something sublimer than an historical 
religion, a philosophy in which redemption should come , 
by knowledge (gnosis), not by faith. Thus the writer of 
the Ist Epistle of John has to protest against the ‘‘ Docetic ”’ | 
view of Christ, which made His humanity a mere 
““semblance,”’ and so distinguished between the heavenly 
Christ and the earthly Jesus as to assert that the heavenly 
Christ came down on the man Jesus at baptism, but 
departed from Him before the crucifixion, so that the 
heavenly Christ had no share in the shame and agony of 
the Cross.1 By the middle of the second century, Christian 
Gnosticism was very widespread. It was found in Asia, 
in Egypt, in Rome, in Carthage, and in Lyons.? It was 
an attempt to combine an alien philosophy with the 
Christian Gospel. 

Some gains Gnosticism brought. As we have seen, to 
the Apologists, Christianity was primarily a new ‘“‘ teach- 
ing,” a new “law.” To the Gnostics, the supreme interest 
was redemption, but redemption more from evil than 
from sin. Tertullian tells us ‘“‘ The same subject matter 
is discussed over and over again by the heretics (i.e. the 
Gnostics) and the philosophers ; the same arguments are 
involved. Whence comes evil? Why is it permitted ? 
What is the origin of man and in what way does he 
come ? 3 

To such questions the Gnostics gave very diverse answers. 
It must suffice to refer briefly to Valentinus, who, after 
having studied in Alexandria, came to Rome, and had 
great influence there between A.D. 135-160. With tedious 
prolixity, he spoke of the birth of Avons from the Primal 
Being. One of the last of these was Christ, who became 


1 Such seems to be the reference of 1 John v. 5, 6. * Loofs, op. cit., p. 106. 

* On Prescription against Heretics,'7. In India I used to notice that Brahman 
students in the Scripture period would try, time after time, to get away from the 
historic Jesus and His demand for Christian character, to the discussion of just 
these problems. 


80 THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES [11t 


the Saviour of the third sphere, this mundane world. 
Christ had no real human birth, for He “‘ passed through | 
Mary just as water passes through a tube.’ And His 
saving work is limited in range. Some men are “‘ material,”’ 
and these cannot be saved. Others are ‘‘ psychic.” These 
may be saved, as ordinary Christians are, by faith and 
works. Some are “ spiritual.’’ These are the true Gnostics, 
who must in any case be saved, “‘ not by means of conduct, 
but because they are spiritual in nature.’* To us, 
Valentinus’ account of the generation of the heavenly 
beings is not only incredible: itis very dull. But to many 
of the cultured of that age it was probably very attractive.* 
Here, at last, was a Christianity worthy of a philosopher’s 
attention. Harnack speaks of the Gnostics as Theologians.4 
They would seem to be less Theologians, than Theosophists, 
leaving to ordinary people the historic religion, but them- 
selves interested chiefly in esoteric teaching which only 
the few could understand. The Gnostic controversy 
involved the Church in deadly peril. The Greeco-Oriental 
syncretism from which Gnosticism sprang has passed away. 
Had the Gnostics won, Christianity would have vanished 
with it. Gnosticism is a warning of the peril of trying to 
accommodate Christianity to an alien philosophy, and, as 
many an attempt to interpret Christianity since has shown, 
it is a warning which can never safely be forgotten.® 
~ The Gnostic controversy had two conspicuous effects 
on Christianity. It compelled the Church to define its 
authority, and to re-explore, with new thoroughness, the 
implicates of its common faith. The Christian Gnostics 
had, for the most part, rejected the Old Testament, and 
justified their theological novelties, either by allegorical 

1 Trenwus, Against Heresies, I. 7, 2. * Op. ctt., I. 6, 2. 

® Cp. the pagan theogony in the Asclepius in the Hermetic literature. 

* History of Dogma, I., p. 227. 

* Cp. the attempt to reconcile Christianity with Hegelianism by substituting 
for the Person of Christ the Christ ‘‘ Idea ” or “‘ Principle,” or the still more recent 


attempt to eliminate the supernatural from Christianity in deference to a natural- 
istic philosophy. 


tir] THE ANTI-GNOSTIC FATHERS 81 


interpretations of the Gospels, or by claiming to possess 
an esoteric revelation, emanating from Christ, although 
unknown to ordinary Christians. Against these pre- 
tensions, the Church claimed to be the sole repository of 
Christian truth, having in its bishops the representatives 
of the Apostles, in the New Testament a Canonical Scripture 
of Apostolic authority, and in the Rule of Faith an Apostolic 
standard to which it had the right to demand obedience. 
Thus, in Irenzus, we already have given us in outline the 
prime facts of the so-called Apostles’ Creed. ‘‘ The Church,” 
he says, ‘“‘though dispersed throughout the whole world, 
even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles 
and their disciples this faith: [She believes] in one God, 
the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and the 
sea and all things that are in them ; and in one Christ Jesus, 
the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation ; 
and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the 
prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and 
the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resur- 
rection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in 
the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and His 
[future] manifestation from heaven in the glory of the 
Father . . . that He should execute just judgement upon 
all.” And Irenseus adds that this is the universal belief, 
unvarying in all the Churches of the earth. ‘“* The Catholic 
Church possesses one and the same faith throughout all 
the world.”? And we find in Tertullian a like account 
of the common beliefs of the Christian Church, and the 
strongest prohibition of any inquiry which “impairs the 
Rule of Faith.’’? 

The problems which Gnosticism raised were too funda- 
mental to be solved by an appeal to authority alone. In 
the great anti-Gnostic Fathers, Ireneus and Tertullian,’ 
there is a new appreciation of the difficulties of Christian 
thought, and a more thorough attempt to grapple with 

1 Against Heresies, I. 10. 2 On Prescription against Heretics, 12, 13. 

" 


82 THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES [rit | 


the intellectual implicates of the Church’s faith. Eagerly 
they protest against the Gnostic separation between the 
Supreme God and the Creator. There is one God alone, 
not a multiplicity of A‘ons, and He is at once Creator, 
Sustainer, and Redeemer, and He is to be known not 
through speculation, but through revelation. As Tertullian 
says: If it be humiliating to God to have dealings with 
us, then, ‘‘as it was necessary to man,” it was “‘ worthy 
of God, because nothing is so worthy of God as the salvation 
of man.”+ And this one God is triune.? At one in their 
central faith, Ireneus and Tertullian represent different 
traditions, and approach, in different ways, the problem 
of Christ’s Person. In Irenzus we have the Father of Greek ; 
in Tertullian, the Father of Western Christology. 


Treneus. 


Ireneus (c. A.D. 140-200), although Bishop of Lyons 
when he wrote his great book, Against Heresies, was brought 
up in Asia Minor, and, as a pupil of Polycarp, represents 
the Asia Minor tradition of Ignatius. The form of his book 
naturally compels him to state his own views, not as a 
system, but in contrast with those of the heretics he opposed, 
but the outlines of his own belief can be clearly discerned. 
Christ is to him, the Word, the Logos. As such, He is the 
true revealer of the Father’s love. The one God, who is 
the Creator, is ‘“‘indeed unknown to all who have been 
made by Him .. . but as regards His love, He is always 
known through Him by whose means He ordained all 
things. Now this is His Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, who 
in the last times was made a man among men, that He 
might join the end to the beginning, that is, man to God.’’? 
Though Irenzus uses the Johannine term, the ‘“‘ Word,” 
he is much under the influence of Pauline thought. Christ 
is the Second Adam; who restores to us all that we lost 


1 Against Marcion, II. 27 (nihil tam dignum deo quam salus hominis). 
* Cp. Seeberg, Dogmengeschichte*, I., pp. 391-6. 
* Against Heresies, IV. 20, 4. 


TIT] THE ANTI-GNOSTIC FATHERS 83 


through Adam’s sin. Very famous is his doctrine of 
redemption by “recapitulation.”+ The word is Pauline, 
but the doctrine, as Irenzeus states it, clearly owes much to 
Greek influence. Like Ignatius before him, Irenzus lays 
much stress on ‘‘incorruptibility,’ and, although he 
preserves the popular view of Christ’s death as a victory 
over the devil, and, as a good Biblicist, repeats Pauline 
phrases, it would seem that it is in the removal of our 
corruptibility that he sees the prime meaning of redemption. 
As Dr. Franks puts it : Irenzus ‘“‘ goes back behind Christ’s 
Cross and Resurrection, and views salvation as already given 
in the Incarnation itself.”* Irenzeus’ chief concern is well 
expressed in words which occur in the preface to the fifth 
book of his treatise. ‘‘ The only true and steadfast teacher, 
the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ . . . through His 
transcendent love became what we are, that He might 
bring us to be even what He is Himself.”’? As we shall see, 
this conception of redemption as restoration of incorrupti- 
bility, had great influence later in Greek theology, and it 
is a view of redemption more metaphysical than ethical. 
But the Church owes an immeasurable debt to Irenzus. 
Harnack, who is not sympathetic to Greek theology, 
remarks of him that he was “the first to whom Jesus 
Christ, God and man, is the centre of history and faith.’’4 
Christ, who was “‘ always with the Father,” has “ broken 
the silence of God,’’ and revealed Him to men. And in 
His incarnation is men’s redemption. 


Tertullian. 


The other great anti-Gnostic Father, Tertullian (c. a.p. 
160-240), was a man of very different tradition and 
temperament. Born in Carthage of pagan parents, and 


1 It is based on Eph. i. 10. dvaxedarawwoacOa Ta ravra év TO Xpiora, 

2 A History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ, I., p. 45. 

* Qui propter immensam suam dilectionem factus est quod sumus nos, uti nos 
perficeret esse quod est ipse. 

* History of Dogma, II., p. 243. 


Mee 


84 THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES [II 


trained as a lawyer, he apparently owed his conversion to 
the courage of Christian martyrs. It is as we remember 
this, that we can understand his occasional fierceness of 
tone. Tertullian wrote as one who knew that the torments 
he had seen inflicted, might, at any time, become his own. 
To such a man the Gnostic surrender to Philosophy seemed 
sheer folly. ‘‘ What has Athens to do with Jerusalem ? 
What concord is there between the Academy and the 
Church ?... Away with all attempts to produce a 
mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic and dialectic com-- 
position, We want no curious disputation after possessing 
Jesus Christ.’’+ 


“» Tertullian can exult in the humanity of Christ and glory 
/ in the fact that He suffered as the martyrs do. If Christ 


was a “‘ phantom,” false is our faith, and all that we hope 
from Christ a phantom too. Defiantly he asserts ‘‘ The 
Son of God was crucified ; I am not ashamed of it, because 
men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God 
died ; itis by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. 
And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, 
because it is impossible.’’ If Christ were a phantom, with 
an unreal humanity, God would be not good, but a cheat 
and a deceiver ; and Christ Himself ‘‘ not the High Priest 
of our salvation, but a conjurer in a show”’ brought down 
‘not from heaven, but from a troop of mountebanks,”2 

Vehemently as Tertullian attacked Gnosticism, he learnt 
from it to clarify his own conception of the nature of Christ. 
And Gnosticism was not the only error which Tertullian 
was concerned to oppose. In a pagan world it was natural 
that Christians should be eager to make explicit their 
monotheism and assert unambiguously the sole Monarchy 
of God. Some of these “‘ Monarchists ’? evaded any appear- 
ance of polytheism by the short and easy way of making 

1 On Prescription against Heretics, 7. 

* On the Flesh of Christ, 5. Here too, by his emphasis on the religious significance 


of Christ’s humility, and true humanity, Tertullian is the precursor of Latin, as 
distinct from Greek, Christology. 


111] THE ANTI-GNOSTIC FATHERS 85 


Christ just a man, upon whom a divine power (dunamis) 
descended, so that ultimately He was adopted into the 
Godhead.t Such a view was inadequate as an expression 
of the Church’s devotion to her Lord ; but distaste for the 
Logos Christology was felt also by many whose full faith 
in Christ could not be questioned, but who sought in another 
way to express their belief in the unity of God, and the 
full divinity of Christ. Why indulge in speculations about 
Christ as the Word, the Logos? The term ‘“‘ Logos ”’ came 
from pagan philosophy, and such speculations seemed to 
involve a belief in two Gods. Why not speak of one God, 
and of Christ, and the Holy Spirit, as temporary modes of 
God ?? Such a teaching seemed both simple and devout 
and it appealed to many ordinary Christians just because 
it appeared to glorify Christ.® 

Praxeas, one of the early teachers of these views, had 
had great influence in Rome; and Tertullian wrote a 
treatise against him, from which his own views can be 
readily derived. The treatise is noteworthy, both for the 
prominence Tertullian gives to the implicates of the divine 
Sonship, and for his use of categories which later had great 
influence in the ecclesiastical statement of the doctrine 
of the Trinity. Tertullian tells us that Praxeas had taught 
that ‘in the course of time, the Father was born and the 
Father suffered,+ God Himself, the Lord Almighty, whom 
in their preaching they declared to be Jesus Christ.’’® 
Possibly the phraseology is as much Tertullian’s as his 
opponent’s, but the words indicate that Praxeas identified 


1 Hence they were called Dynamic Monarchians. They represent the “‘ Adoptian- 
ist” tradition we have already noticed in the Shepherd of Hermas. Such views 
were taught by Theodotus the Tanner in Rome in the last quarter of this century, 
and later acquired great notoriety through Paul of Samosata. 

* Hence they are called Modalist Monarchians, 

3 Cp. the words of Noetus who continued the work of Praxeasin Rome. ‘‘ What 
evil then am I doing in glorifying Christ ?”’ quoted in Hippolytus, Against the 
Heresy of one Noetus, 1. 

“ Hence the nickname Tertullian gives to the views of his opponents, “‘ Pat- 
ripassianism.” 

5 Against Praxeas, 2. 


86 THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES {111 


Christ with the Father by making Him a temporary phase 
of the Godhead. Tertullian denies that the distinction of 
the Son from the Father affected the ‘“‘ Monarchy ”’ of the 
Father, for the Father is supreme. The Father is the 
“entire substance, but the Son is a derivation and part 
of the whole.”+ Though the Son was pre-existent, ‘‘ there 
was a time when He was not.”? The Son came into real 
existence before the Creation, but had no separate existence 
until He thus proceeded from the Father. Tertullian | 
thus still moved in part in the thought world of the 
Apologists, and had not yet reached the conception of 
an eternal Son, the correlate of the eternal Father. It is 
the Trinity of manifestation of which he speaks, not the 
Trinity immanent in the eternal life of God, and this 
Trinity of manifestation he described in words decisive 
for later orthodoxy. The Unity is a Trinity ; ‘“‘ the Father, 
the Son, and the Holy Ghost; three, however, not in 
condition, but in degree; not in substance, but in form, 
not in power, but in aspect: yet of one substance, and 
of one condition, and of one power, inasmuch as He is one 
God, from whom these degrees, and forms, and aspects, 
are reckoned, under the name of the Father, and the Son, 
and of the Holy Ghost.’’? ‘“‘ The Father is God, and the 
Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, and each is God.’’4 
One “substance” (substantia) and three ‘persons ”’ 
(persone): we have here already the final formula of 
orthodoxy.® 

Tertullian not only provided the Church with a vocabulary 
in which to express the relation of the Son to the Trinity, 
but a vocabulary in which the relation of the divine to the 
human in the incarnate life could be expressed. Often, 
indeed, he used the rhetorical phrases of popular piety 

1 Against Praxeas, 9, * Against Hermogenes, 3. 

® Against Praxeas, 2 * Op. cit., 13. 

* The history and meaning of these terms is lucidly described in two articles by 


Rougier in Revue del’ Histoire des Religions, 1916, pp. 48 and 133. A shorter account 
is given by Webb, God and Personality, pp. 35-60. 


IIT] THE ANTI-GNOSTIC FATHERS 87 


which will not readily fit into the later formulz,} but, 
when he had the errors of Praxeas in mind, he was careful 
to avoid any confusion between the divine and the human, 
the spirit and the flesh, in Christ. ‘‘ The property of each 
nature is so wholly preserved that the Spirit, on the one 
hand, did all things in Jesus suitable to itself, such as 
miracles, and mighty deeds, and wonders, and the Flesh, 
on the other hand, exhibited the affections which belonged 
to it.’ Thus ‘the two substances acted distinctly, each 
in its own character,’ and “there necessarily occurred 
to them separately their own operations, and their own 
issues.” Thus there is a ‘‘ twofold state, which is not 
confounded, but conjoined in one Person—Jesus, God and 
man.’’? Itis possible to doubt the adequacy of this solution, 
but we shall see how influential in later orthodoxy were 
these famous and oft-quoted words. 

} E.g. “ God really lived on earth, and took upon Him the low estate of human 


form,” “Against Marcion, II. 16. 
Against Praxeas, 27. 


an tad 


IV 
THE EASTERN CHURCH 


‘‘ Most Christians,”’ says Tertullian, “‘ are simple folk, not 
to say unwise and unlearned.’’! By the beginning of the 
third century, such a judgement would scarcely apply to 
the Church of the East. Amongst its teachers were men 
adept in the best knowledge of their age, and, theological 
schools were established, interested in theology as a science. 
Most famous of these was the School of Alexandria. The 
Church there was obviously wealthy,? and many of its 
young men studied in its great pagan University. For 
this, of course, the price had to be paid. Some abandoned 
Christianity for paganism.? But it was an immense gain 
to the Church that many of its members were acquainted 
with secular culture. And the Church’s Catechetical School 
was able to exercise a wide influence in the pagan University. 
Founded apparently by Panteenus, it had as its two most 
famous teachers, Clement of Alexandria from about 
A.D. 190-202 and Origen from a.pD, 202-31. 


Clement of Alexandria. 


Clement of Alexandria (c. A.D. 150-215) is important in 
the history of Christian doctrine, less for his own con- 
tribution, than as the precursor of Origen. A man of wide, 
if not always accurate, learning, he was able to meet 

* Against Praxeas, 3, simplices quique, ne dixerim imprudentes et idiote, que 
maior semper pars credentium est. 

* Cp. Clement of Alexandria’s protests in his Instructor against the lavish, and 


sometimes grotesque, luxury of Christians, 
* K.g. Ammonius Saccas, the founder of Neo-Platonism, 


88 


Iv] CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 89 


cultivated pagans on their own ground. He could quote 
the poets as well as they could; and, in an age which 
prized philosophy as the highest of human activities, could 
present Christianity as the noblest of all philosophies, able, 
by its perfect truth, to supersede all that had gone before. 

Sometimes Clement uses the common Christian fable 
that Plato owed to Moses what was true in his philosophy. 
More characteristically, he teaches that the divine Word 
(Logos), perfectly revealed in Christ, was the Word from 
whom all truth comes, so that Greek philosophy was as 
much meant to lead the Greeks to Christ, as the law of 
Moses to lead to Him the Jews.) It is through the eternal 
Word that all revelation comes, for God is unknowable. 
We ‘“‘ know not what He is, but what He is not.’”? With 
rare charm and power, Clement describes the adaptation 
of Christ to men of every stage.* Christianity, as Clement 
presented it, must have seemed to cultivated pagans a 
far more attractive religion than ever they had dreamed, 
but it was a Christianity which, if it owed much to Christ, 
owed much also to non-Christian sources, For the ordinary 
Christian, faith and fear and hope sufficed, but the 
* Gnostic,’’ the Christian who “ knew,’ had reached a 
higher stage than the Christian who only trusted and 
obeyed. This higher way of knowledge (gnosis) was not 
restricted, as the heretic Gnostics claimed, to those born 
“spiritual.” All could tread it who were ready to 
philosophise. Such, with souls made passionless, attain 
to the highest exercise of man, the contemplation of the 
divine. 

If the true Gnostic must seek to be _ passionless, 
“apathetic,” what of the sufferings of Christ, the pattern 
of all true Gnostics? Clement declares that He was 
“impassible,”’ “‘apathetic.” ‘The Saviour ate, not for 


1 Cp. Miscellanies, I. 5. 2 Op. cit., V. 11. 
* Cp. the last chapter of his Zzhortation and his familiar hymn, “ Bridle of Colts 
untamed,” 


90 THE EASTERN CHURCH [Iv 


the sake of the body, which was kept together by a holy 
energy, but in order that it might not enter into the minds 
of those who were with Him to entertain a different opinion 
of Him; in like manner as certainly some afterwards 
supposed that He appeared in a phantasmal shape. But 
He was entirely impassible ; inaccessible to any movement 
of feeling—either pleasure or pain.’ We have here an 
indication of the peril to Christianity of the Greek type — 
lof thought. Christ is the Word, the Logos, but the God 
He reveals is a philosopher’s God, not the Father, who 
can feel, and love, and suffer ; and the incarnation of the 
Word is incomplete. His humanity is half unreal. Nor 
‘is the moral ideal of Christianity left uninfluenced. A 
holy life is, indeed, a necessary preliminary to perfection, 
but the highest Christian life is desireless and contem- 
plative.? 


Origen. 


Clement was primarily a Christian philosopher. His 
successor, Origen (A.D. 185-254), was a theologian, one 
whose theology proved as influential in the Greek Church 
as Augustine’s became in the Church of the West. 

Origen’s theology is most clearly summed up in his great 
systematic treatise On the First Principles (De Principiis). 
God is a purely spiritual Being, incorporeal and incom- 
prehensible and invisible. Christ is the Wisdom which 
was eternally with God the Father. He is the only-begotten 
Son of God, who was indeed born of God the Father and 
derives from Him what He is, but without any beginning. 
“His generation is as eternal, and everlasting, as the 
brilliancy which is produced from the sun.’’? God is the 
‘primal goodness.” The Son is the ‘“ image of His good- 


1 The Miscellanies, VI. 9. Translations from Clement and Origen are from the 
Ante-Nicene Library. 

* Sihler remarks, “‘ We call Clement a Greek Father, but in many of his utter- 
ances he is more a Greek than a Father,” From Augustus to Augustine, p. 95. 

* De Principiis, 1. 2, 4, ‘‘ eterna generatio sicut splendor generatur ex luce,” 


tv] ORIGEN 91 


ness. For there is no other second goodness existing in 
the Son, save that which is in the Father.’’! Thus, in these 
opening chapters of Origen’s great work, we are introduced 
to the two aspects of his thought about the relation of the 
Son to the Father ; His co-eternity and His subordination : 
God is the eternal Father, and the Son is co-eternal with 
Him by the eternal generation of God. He shares in the 
divine Essence. In a fragment of one of Origen’s com- 
mentaries we find the very word which later became the 
keyword of Nicene orthodoxy. The Son is “of one 
essence,” “‘ homoousios’’? with the Father. At the same 
time, Origen asserts strongly the Son’s “ subordination ” 
to the Father. As we have seen, He is not goodness itself, 
but the image of the Father’s goodness. As Origen says 
in his Apology, he is ‘‘ a second God,’’? receiving “‘ honour 
second only to that which is given to the Most High God.’’4 

Of the person of the incarnate Son, Origen speaks with 
reserve. The greatest of all wonders to him is this, that 
the ‘“‘ very Word of the Father and that very Wisdom of 
God, in which were created all things, visible and invisible, 
can be believed to have existed within the limits of that 
man who appeared in Judea; nay, that the Wisdom of 
God can have entered the womb of a woman, and have 
been born an infant, and have uttered wailings like the 
cries of little children. And that afterwards it should be 
related that He was greatly troubled in death, saying, as 
He Himself declared, ‘My soul is sorrowful, even unto 
death’; and that at the last He was brought to the death 
which is accounted the most shameful among men, although 
He rose again on the third day. Since then we see in Him 
some things so human that they differ in no respect from 
the common frailty of mortals, and some things so divine 
that they can appropriately belong to nothing else than 

+ Op. cit., I. 2, 13. 

* ouoovctos. Ina fragment of a commentary on Hebrews quoted by Tixeront, 


History of Doegmas, E.T., I.*, p. 265, 
8 Against Celsus, V. 39. * Op. cit., VIL. 57. 


92 THE EASTERN CHURCH [IV 


to the divine and ineffable nature of Deity, the narrowness 
_ of human understanding can find no outlet.’ Origen feels 
that the explanation of the mystery is beyond his reach. 
‘T think it surpasses the power even of the holy apostles ; 
nay, the explanation of that mystery may perhaps be 
beyond the grasp of the entire creation of celestial powers.” 
The explanation which Origen proceeds to give is this. . 
The Only-begotten of God had a soul, which, pre-existent 
like all other human souls, was inherent in Him from the 
beginning, and ‘‘receiving Him wholly, and passing into 
His light and splendour, was made with Him, in a pre- 
eminent degree one spirit.”” ‘This substance of a soul 
then, being intermediate between God and the flesh—it 
being impossible for the nature of God to intermingle with 
a body without an intermediate instrument—the God-man 
is born, or, as we have said, that substance being the 
intermediary, to whose nature it was not’ contrary to 
receive a body.” As this pre-existent rational soul could 
receive both the human and the divine, there could be an 
interchange of attributes. ‘‘ The Son of God is named 
Jesus Christ, and the Son of man,’’ and ‘‘is said to have 
died”; ‘‘ whilst He is called the Son of man, who is 
announced as about to come in the glory of God the 
Father, with the holy angels.’’4 

It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the 
service Origen rendered to the Church of his time. By 
his interpretation of the Gospel in the categories of the 
best culture of his age, he made Christianity intelligible 
and attractive to educated men, and helped to destroy 
the Gnosticism which made a complete surrender of 
Christianity to pagan thought. But not all was gain. 
Origen’s God is only partly the God of Jesus Christ ; partly 
‘He is the indefinable and infinitely transcendent God of 
Neo-Platonism, and, because of his uncertainty about God, 
Origen’s doctrine of Christ’s person is ambiguous. Christ 


1 De Principiis, Il. 6, 1-3. The whole chapter is of great importance. 


Iv] ORIGEN 93 


is, at once, one with God, and an intermediary between 
the remote and lonely Absolute and the created world 
of nature and of men. It is little wonder that, as Seeberg 
says, no one has reproduced Origen’s Christology as a 
whole.t It was a complex which only his subtle mind 
could hold together, and, later, orthodox and heterodox 
alike were able to claim for their views the authority of 
the most fertile thinker of the Eastern Church. 


The Successors of Origen. 


Great as was Origen’s influence, his view of Christ was 
not allowed to go without challenge.2 To many the Logos 
Christology still seemed a new Gnosticism, and a menace 
to a monotheistic view of God. In the end, its victory 
was decisive ; and, before the close of the third century, 
the chief churches of the East had included in their 
Baptismal Symbols clauses declaring Christ to be the 
Logos, the Word of God.* But it was difficult, even for 
Origen’s disciples, to hold in unity the disparate elements 
of his Theology. Even when his more startling novelties 
were rejected or ignored, there was still the strain of 
combining his teaching on the Son’s co-eternity with the 
Father with his teaching on the Son’s inferiority. Thus 
there developed a right and left school of Origenists, the 
one emphasising the co-eternity ; the other, the inferiority. 
Of Origenists of the right wing, we have a good illustration 
in Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria from a.p. 313-28, 
With him was closely associated Athanasius (c. A.D, 298— 
373), a young man whom he had taken into his household, 
who later became his deacon and secretary. When not 

1 Op, cit., I. p. 523, 

2 Cp. the revival of Monarchianism in (1) the modalist form of Sabellius, who 
perfecting the teaching of Praxeas and Noetus, declared that the Father, the Son 
and the Holy Spirit are temporary phases (prosopa) of the one God, the Son- 
Father (0 viowrdrwp) or (2) the dynamic (adoptianist) form of Paul of Samosata, the 
Patriarch of Antioch, who was deposed at the Council of Antioch held in a.p, 269, 


8 Loofs, op. cit., p. 220. Cp. the Creed of Cesarea, which Eusebius submitted to 
the Council of Nicza in a.D, 325. 


94 THE EASTERN CHURCH [iv 


more than twenty years of age, Athanasius wrote a book, 

‘\On the Incarnation of the Word of God, which requires 
careful study, not only as a great Christian classic, but as 
the book which, more than any other, reveals the religious 
interests which enabled Athanasius to take a decisive part 
in the Arian controversy which broke out soon after it was 
written, 


Athanasius. On the Incarnation.+ 
The book begins with a discussion of the doctrine of 
creation. ‘‘God has made all things out of nothing by > 
His own Word, Jesus Christ our Lord” (§2) and “ gave 
us freely, by the grace of the Word, a life in correspondence 
with God. But men, having rejected things eternal, and 
by counsel of the Devil, turned to the things of corruption 
(§5). Thus “‘ death having gained upon men, and corrup- 
tion abiding upon them, the race of man was perishing,”’ 
and the hold of death was legal, for man had transgressed 
God’s law. What then could God do? He ‘‘ would not 
be true, if when He had said we should die, man died not.” 
Yet ‘‘it was unseemly that creatures once made rational, 
and having partaken of the Word, should go to ruin, and | 
turn again toward non-existence by the way of corruption ”’ 
(§6). Repentance might have sufficed if it had only been 
a matter of man’s misdemeanour, but repentance could 
not stay the course of corruption. Only the Word of God 
could meet men’s need. “‘ He alone of natural fitness was 
both able to recreate everything, and worthy to suffer on 
behalf of all and to be ambassador for all with the 
Father ”’ (§ 7). 
_ So the Word “took a body of our kind,” ‘from a 
‘spotless and stainless Virgin,” and gave His body ‘“‘ over 
to death in the stead of all and offered it to the Father,”’ 
that thus the law involving man in ruin might be undone, 


1 Translations from Athanasius are from Robertson’s edition in the Select 
Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 


ty] ATHANASIUS 95 


and men turned again toward incorruption (§8). Just 
as the presence of a great king in a city makes it honoured 
and secure, so the abode of the Word in a body removes 
from our race the corruption of death (§ 9). 

Not only were men corrupt ; they were ignorant of God 
and were no longer able to know God through the Word, 
which is His image and in which they shared. God indeed 
had foreseen men’s forgetfulness, and had provided that 
they should be reminded of Him, through the works of 
nature, and through the Law, and the Prophets, but they 
had failed to learn from these. Men were engrossed in 
things of sense. So ‘‘the loving and general Saviour of 
all, the Word of God, takes to Himself a body, and as Man 
walks among men and meets the senses of men, half-way ”’ 
(§15). It was on this account that the Word “did not 
immediately upon His coming accomplish His sacrifice 
on behalf of all, by offering His body to death, and raising 
it again.” For He came not only “to put away death 
from us and to renew us again,” but “to manifest and 
make Himself known by His work to be the Word of the 
Father, and the Ruler and King of the universe ”’ (§ 16). 
Though thus manifest to men, the Word was not circum- 
scribed by the body of His incarnation. ‘“ He was not 
bound to His body, but rather was Himself wielding it, 
so that He was not only in it, but was actually in every- 
thing, and while external to the universe, abode in His 
Father only ” (§ 17). 

It was with redemption from corruption that Athanasius 
was primarily concerned. Christ’s own body, “‘ by virtue 
of the union of the Word with it, was no longer subject to 
corruption, according to its own nature,’’ and for us, too, 
corruption has ceased so that at death “‘ we are only 
dissolved, that we may be able to gain a better resur- 
rection ”’ (§§ 20, 21). Christ could not have died of disease 
or weakness. He had to die at the hand of others. No 
death was so good for us as His death upon the Cross. 


56 THE EASTERN CHURCH {1v 


Thus dying, He fulfilled the curse of the law, and “ by 
being lifted up, cleared the air of the malignity both of the 
devil and of demons of all kinds ”’ (§ 25). 

Athanasius proceeds to deal with the objections of Jews 
and of Gentiles. The objections of Jews he meets by the 
familiar ‘‘ proofs ” of Jewish prophecy (§§ 33-40). Of more 
interest is his answer to Gentile objections (§§ 40-55). 
Already the power of pagan cults and myths is passing 
and the demons are losing their hold on men. Whereas 
the philosophers of Greece “‘ were unable to persuade even - 
a few in their own neighbourhood concerning immortality 
and a virtuous life, Christ alone, by ordinary language, 
and by men not skilled with the tongue, has throughout 
all the world persuaded whole churches full of men to 
despise death, and to mind the things of immortality ” 
(§47). “‘ Whoremongers are chaste, and murderers no 
longer hold the sword, and those who were formerly 
mastered by cowardice play the man.’ Whereas virginity 
was thought impossible, even children give themselves to 
be virgins. Wars are stayed, and, by such works as these, 
it is clear that Christ is the Word of God, the Power of 
God. 

Such is Athanasius’ great book. It is not so much an 
apology for Christianity as a pean of victory. The fiercest 
persecution had failed to destroy the Church. Paganism 
had been defeated. The Church was not tolerated only, 
but triumphant, and to the persecutions from without 
there had not yet succeeded the bitter strife of warring 
sections within the Church. 

We cannot study this book without realising its religious 
importance. ‘‘ He was made man, that we might be made 
God, and He manifested Himself by a body, that we might 
receive the idea of the unseen Father.”! Deification and 
revelation—such are to Athanasius the main aspects of 
redemption. It is difficult to understand just what is 


1 $54, 3. 


Iv] THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY 97 


meant by the restoration to man of incorruptibility through 
Christ’s incarnation and resurrection. It is an idea of 
redemption which corresponds to a metaphysic meaningless 
to most of us to-day, and connected with an ethical ideal 
which sees in virginity the highest virtue. Here Athanasius 
spoke as a Greek to Greeks, interpreting the Gospel through 
Greek conceptions. His greatness lies, not in his inter- 
pretation of redemption, but in his concentration on 
redemption, and his realisation of its implicates. No 
longer, as in Origen, is Christianity complicated with 
cosmological speculations. Of a perfectly coherent theory 
we cannot speak, yet his theology is unified by his realisation 
that a perfectly adequate redemption could only come 
through a perfectly adequate Saviour. To him, belief in 
the full Godhead of Christ was not just a theologoumenon. 
It was a vital experience. To make Christ less than fully 
divine would have destroyed his inmost religion. It was 
an inestimable gain to the Church that, when the Arian 
controversy broke out, it had one, like Athanasius, who 
understood the meaning of the issue, and was able to do 
battle for what he held to be the truth, not as an ecclesiastic, 
or as a theological pedant, but as one who understood 
the religious interests involved, interests which are the 
concern, not of theologians alone, but of all Christian 
people. 


The Arian Controversy. 


Arius (A.D. 256-336) was a presbyter of Alexandria, 
held in high honour for his zeal and integrity. About 
A.D. 319 he aroused great interest in the Church by teaching | 
“that the Son was created, not made ’’; ‘“‘ there was once 
when He was not.” The very fact that He was Son proved 
that He could not be co-eternal with the Father. After 
some hesitation, Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria, 
summoned a Synod which excommunicated Arius and 
his followers. Arius left Alexandria, and was soon able 

G 


——— 


98 THE EASTERN CHURCH [rv 


to secure influential support from high-placed ecclesiastics, 
whilst he won the popular ear by his Thalia, Convivial 
Songs, in which he expressed his theology in a frivolous 
metre. Fragments of these are preserved for us by 
Athanasius and, with two letters written in exile,? are all 
of Arius’ works which remain for our study. 

Short as are these remains, they are sufficient to indicate 
Arius’ position. It receives careful expression in his letter 
to Alexander, his old bishop. There is one God, “alone. 
Ingenerate,”’ ‘‘alone Unbegun,” ... “who begat an 
Only-begotten Son before eternal times, through whom 
He has made both the ages and the universe; and begat 
Him, not in substance, but in truth’’; ‘‘ perfect creature 
of God, but not as one of the creatures; offspring, but 
not as one of things begotten . . . not eternal or co-eternal 
or co-unoriginate with the Father . . . but God is before all 
things, as being Monad and Beginning of all. Wherefore 
also He is before the Son.” In the Z'halia, the same thoughts 
receive more open expression. “‘ The Unbegun made the 
Son a beginning of things originated. . . . He has nothing 
proper to God in proper subsistence. For He is not equal, 
no, nor one in essence with Him. God is ineffable to His 
Son.”’? “The Word was made out of nothing. ... By 
nature, as all others, so the Word Himself is alterable, and 
remains good by His own free will... . Though He is 
called God, yet He is not very God but, by participation 


-of grace, He, as others, is God only in name.’’* Not only 


Christ’s Godhead, but His true humanity was impugned, 
for His body was, in Arius’ teaching, a “‘body without a 
soul.”’® It is clear that Arius’ view seemed to many both 
Scriptural and logical. It preserved the ‘‘ monarchy ”’ of 
God, but it did so in a pagan way. Christians were still 

1 Athanasius speaks of “ the dissolute tone of his metre ’’ (De Synodis, 15). 

2 A letter to his patron Eusebius of Nicomedia, given in Theodoret’s Ecclesiastical 
History, I. 5, and a letter to Alexander of Alexandria given in Athanasius, De 


Synodis, 16, from which our quotations are taken. 
2 Op. cit., 15. “ Against the Arians, I. 5, 6. 5 gaya dwuxov, 


Iv] THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY 99 


bidden to worship Christ, and yet Christ was only a demi- 
God ; and such worship is idolatry. 

The strife became so bitter that the Emperor Constantine 
thought it necessary to interfere. In a letter sent through 
Hosius of Cordova, a Western bishop, to Alexandria, he 
insisted on the need of peace, and argued that the question 
was of “a truly insignificant character, and quite unworthy 
of such fierce contention.’’! ‘The issue was too vital to be 
evaded, even at the Emperor’s request. Hosius had to 
report to the Emperor his failure, and, probably at his 
advice, the Emperor summoned an (Xcumenical Council, 
which met at Nicwa in a.p..325,.. The Council was opened 
by an appeal from the Emperor for peace. After much 
debate, Eusebius of Cesarea brought forward the traditional 
Baptismal Confession of his church. It declared faith ‘‘ in 
one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Word of God, God from God, 
Light from Light, Life from Life, Only-begotten Son, first- 
born of all creation, before the ages begotten from the 
Father.”? The Creed was “ unassailable on the basis of 
Scripture and of tradition,’? but it did not explicitly 
exclude the Arian view. At length the Emperor himself, 
probably at the suggestion of Hosius, proposed the word 
‘‘homoousion,” ‘‘of the same essence.” The Imperial 
suggestion was adopted, and the Creed of Caesarea was 
carefully revised so that its most important clause was 
now this: ‘‘ We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ the Son 
of God, begotten of the Father, only begotten, that is from 
the essence of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, 
very God from very God, begotten not made, of one essence 
(homoousion) with the Father.” The Creed then proceeds 
to quote, with slight modifications, the rest of the Creed 
proposed by Eusebius, ‘‘ by whom all things were made, 
both things in heaven and things in earth ; who for us men 

1 The letter is preserved in Eusebius’ Life of Constantine, II. 64-72. 

2 A critical edition of the text is given in Hahn, Symbole und Glaubensregeln der 


alten Kirche’, pp. 131, 132. 
* Robertson, Athanasius, p. xix. 


100 THE EASTERN CHURCH [Iv 


and for our salvation came down, and was made flesh, was 
made man, suffered, and rose again the third day, ascended 
into heaven, and cometh to judge the quick and the dead.”’ 
, In an appendix to the Creed, Arians are explicitly 
anathematised. ‘‘ Those who say ‘There was, when He 
was not’ or that ‘ before He was begotten, He was not ’ 
and that ‘He was made out of nothing’ or who pretend 
that the Son of God is ‘ of another subsistence (hypostasis),. 
or essence (ousia),’ or that He was ‘a creature,’ or ‘ subject 
to change or conversion ’—the Catholic Church anathe- 
matises,”’ 

The Creed was carried with only two dissentients, but it - 
was soon clear that the victory over Arianism was prema- 
ture and illusive. Most of the bishops were averse to 
Arianism, but they were unprepared for the ‘‘ homoousion ”’ 
doctrine. The word itself was unbiblical, and it had an 
heretical sound.1' At the time of the Council of Nicxa 
Athanasius was only a presbyter, and he could not have 
been responsible for its terminology. The word ‘‘ homoou- 
sios’’ came apparently, not from Alexandria, but from the 
West. It seems to have been suggested by Hosius, and 
represents the phrase “of one substance,” which had 
become traditional in the West.? Arianism had challenged 
both Christ’s true divinity and His true manhood. It was 
the challenge to His divinity that was at first prominent, 
and in this struggle the great protagonist of Nicene ortho- 
doxy was Athanasius. 

That struggle was a severe one. There was a great Con- 
servative reaction in favour of a return to the vagueness 
of view which prevailed before the Council of Nicza. 
Athanasius, who became Bishop of Alexandria in a.p. 328 
at Alexander’s death, was attacked as the leader of ortho- 


4 It had been condemned at the Council of Antioch in a.p, 269 because of its 
use by Paul of Samosata, who developed the “‘ Dynamic Monarchianism” of 
Theodotus. See earlier, pp. 85 and 93. 

i Loofs, op. cit., p. 241. The words unius substantie date at least from Ter- 
tallian. 


Iv] THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY 101 


doxy, not only by the Arians, but by the Conservatives, 
who disliked the Nicene definition, because they felt that 
the word ‘‘ homoousion ”’ would lead to Monarchianism of 
the Sabellian type. Constantine, finding that the Council 
had not brought peace, reverted to his earlier view that the 
controversy was not worth the strife, and, shortly before 
his death, sought to secure quiet by recalling Arius and 
banishing Athanasius. At Constantine’s death in A.D. 337 
Athanasius returned to his see. But the new Emperor 
of the East, Constantius II, sympathised with the Arians, 
and Athanasius had to flee to Rome, where the Emperor 
Constans was orthodox. At length, in a.p. 346, he was 
able to return to Alexandria, and in the ‘‘ Golden Decade ”’ 
which followed, secure in the support of the Egyptian monks, 
set himself to the consolidation of orthodoxy in his diocese. 
In A.D. 356 he had again to flee, and for six years lived in 
hiding in desert hermit cells. These years of exile were 
years of great importance for his cause, The triumph of 
Arianism led the extreme Arians to express themselves 
with a frankness which offended the Conservatives, who 
were more shocked at their denial that Christ ‘‘ was like 
God’? than by the Nicene declaration that He was “ of 
the same essence ” as the Father. It was in this exile that 
Athanasius wrote his great Orations against the Arians. 
Only once in the first three Orations does he use the word 
*“ homoousios,’ and he recognises gratefully the partial 
truth of the phrase now characteristic of the Semi-Arians, 
“like in essence.”’ §till more conciliatory was his book 
De Synodis. Vigorous as was its attack on the extreme 
Arians, Athanasius in this book, with an insight not too 
common in theological controversy, showed that he could 
understand and seek to meet the scruples of the Semi- 
Arians. “Since they say that He is ‘ of the essence’ and 


i Their fears were confirmed by what they regarded as the Sabellian views of 
Marcellus, a friend of Athanasius. So long as ousia and hypostasis were confused, 
it was natural that homoousion should seem Sabellian. 

* The view of the Anomceans. 


102 THE EASTERN CHURCH [Iv 


‘like in essence,’ what do they signify by these but co- 
essential ? For while to say only ‘like in essence’ does 
not necessarily convey ‘of the essence,’ on the contrary 
to Bay ‘co-essential’ is to signify the meaning of both 
terms ‘like in essence’ and ‘of the essence.’”’! So he pleads 
with them to pass from *“ iomeotouetos ” to “ homoou- 
sio8, * from ‘‘ like in essence”’ to ‘“‘of the essence,” that 
so “‘all strife and jealousy may cease . . . and the guilty 
and murderous heresy of the Arians may disappear,’’? 

At the accession of Julian the Apostate, Athanasius 
returned for a while to Alexandria, and set himself to unite 
Semi-Arians with the orthodox in common hostility to 
Arianism. After Julian’s death, Arianism seemed again to 
triumph, but by now the upholders of this Nicene definition 
had increasingly with them the moderates of the Church. 
Their fear of Sabellianism was removed by the closer 
definitions of the three great Cappadocians,* who, instead 
of speaking, as the anathema of the Creed of Niczea does, 
as if the Son were not of one essence only but of one 
hypostasis also with the Father, spoke of the one essence 
of God of which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were the 
three hypostases, thus expressing at once the unity and 
the distinction of the Son and the Father. The last few 
years of Athanasius’ life were years of quiet and honour, 
and when he died in 4.p. 373 the triumph of his cause was 
near, Hight years later, the orthodox Emperor Theodosius 
summoned a Council at Constantinople, which reaffirmed 
the Creed of Niczea, and in the following year Arianism was 
suppressed by law, and henceforth was influential only 
outside the confines of the Empire. 

The Council of Constantinople was an Eastern Council, 
and it was long before it was recognised as Cicumenical. 
To it the great Council of Chalcedon of a.p. 451 assigns the 


1 De Synodis, 41. 2 Op. cit., 
Fe Basil of Cesarea, $379, Gregory of Woniancoe 4380, and Gregory of Nyssa, 


Iv] THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY 103 


so-called Constantinopolitan, the ‘‘ Nicene’’ Creed, as it 
is commonly called. It seems clear that no such creed was 
promulgated at Constantinople. A Creed, identical, except 
in some details, is known to have existed some years before 
the Council met, and it is generally held that the so-called 
Nicene, or Constantinopolitan, Creed is really a Baptismal 
Symbol of the Church of Jerusalem, enlarged, by additions 
derived from the Creed of the Council of Nicza,1 and by 
a clause designed to exclude inadequate views of the Holy 
Spirit. Whether the Creed thus modified had become the 
creed of the Church of Constantinople is uncertain, but, in 
some way or other it seems to have been associated with the 
Acts of the Council of Constantinople. It represents the 
triumph of the new orthodoxy which united the Semi- 
Arians and the followers of Athanasius. At Chalcedon this 
creed was ratified, together with the Creed of the Council 
of Nicwa. In course of time the two creeds were identified. 
The earlier creed fell into oblivion, and the so-called Nicene 
Creed became the eucharistic creed of both East and West. 

Arius had not only challenged the belief in Christ’s full 
divinity ; by teaching that the Word took “‘ a body without 
a soul’’ he had challenged also the belief in Christ’s true 
manhood. But this challenge was largely ignored, and it 
was only long after the beginnings of the Arian controversy 
that the problem of the relation of the divine to the human 
elements in Christ was faced, and the controversies which 
ensued took their form, less from Arius’ teaching than 
from the opposition of the two great schools of Alexandria 
and Antioch. The controversy about Christ’s divinity 
was saved from futility by the clear appreciation that 
Athanasius had of its religious interests. There could only 
be a full redemption if the Redeemer be one fully divine. 
The controversies about Christ’s manhood lack any such 


1 The homoousion is retained, but the words “ of the essence of the Father ”’ are 
lacking, as is the anathema which, by its identification of ousia and hypostasis, was 
opposed to the vocabulary of the later orthodoxy. For a comparison of the two 
creeds see Hort, Z'wo Dissertations. 


104 THE EASTERN CHURCH [Iv 


clear issue. Both the opposing views represented ancient 
modes of thought, and stood for genuine religious interests. 
On neither side do we find any real endeavour to find a 
higher truth which should reconcile truths which seemed 
to be in contradiction. Instead, we find misrepresentation 
and intolerance, the desire not to understand but to 
conquer. A victorious majority was not content to ruin > 
an opponent. It must also destroy his works. And tradi- 
tional accounts of these controversies have been unduly 
based on the statements of men who were not concerned to 
say what a “heretic” really taught, but only to have his 
“heresy ’? both condemned and hated. As we shall see, 
Apollinarius was not an “ Apollinarian,’ nor Nestorius a 
‘* Nestorian,” in the crude sense given these words by their 
enemies. The problem raised was possibly insoluble. 
Certainly it could not be solved by the categories of ancient 
thought, and the supposed solution at Chalcedon was no 
solution, but only a preservation of the problem. 


The Apollinarian Controversy. 


The outbreak of the controversies which were to trouble 
the Church for more than three centuries was due to the 
ill-timed teaching of Apollinarius, Bishop of Laodicea.} 
He was a man of devoted character and great learning, and 
held in such high repute as a theologian that both Athana- 
sius and Basil were glad to consult him. For long he 
laboured as an eager supporter of Nicene orthodoxy, occupy- 
ing himself chiefly with lecturing and writing. We do not 
know when he began to teach publicly his distinctive views 
about Christ’s person. To him they were of such import- 
ance that he made them a condition of communion, and it 


1 His life fills the larger part of the fourth century. The dates of his birth and 
death are uncertain. 

* By a strange irony, the Letter to Epictetus which Athanasius sent to Apollinarius 
for his approval and comment has been supposed to attack the views of Apollinarius, 
and thus there have been assigned to him crude Docetic views which he himself 
condemned. See Raven, Apollinarianism, pp. 103-5, 


Iv] THE APOLLINARIAN CONTROVERSY 105 


is probable that the anger with which he was attacked by 
the younger Nicene party was due less to his views than 
to the inappropriateness of the time of their propagation. 
An Arian Emperor ruled; the Church was divided into 
many warring parties. It was important that all who held 
the Nicene faith should unite in its defence. The leaders 
of the School of Antioch were as loyal to the Nicene defini- 
tion as any of the Alexandrines. It was no time to attack 
their Christology ; still more foolish was it for Apollinarius 
to exclude from communion those who did not share his 
views. 

The Schools of Alexandria and of Antioch represented 
respectively the two types of interpretations of Christ’s 
person. The one saw in Christ the Word made flesh ; 
the other saw in Him a man in whom God dwelt.1 We 
have already seen how an Alexandrian like Athanasius 
formulated the first view; the leaders of the School of 
Antioch developed the latter view by emphasising the 
existence in Christ of two natures, one divine, one 
human, and thus were able to teach the true humanity 
of Christ which their sober exegesis enabled them to see 
portrayed in the Gospel story. Each type of view had its 
advantage and its peril. The Alexandrian preserved the 
unity of Christ’s person, and presented to Christian faith 
the God made man in Him, but it tended to ignore Christ’s 
real humanity. The Antiochene view preserved Christ’s 
true humanity, and could speak of His actual sorrows and 
real development, but it tended to destroy the concrete | 
unity of the person, or to preserve it only by relapsing into | 
a lower view of Christ, to see in Him not the God-man but 
a man whom God inspired. 

It was the view of Antioch that Apollinarius was chiefly 
concerned to attack. He saw in it a form of Adoptianism, 

1 Or, as Tixeront puts it, the School of Alexandria “ placed in the foreground 
the divinity of the Incarnate Word and the intimate union of His person,” the 


School of Antioch “‘ endeavoured to distinguish the two natures in the God-man 
and preferred to dwell on His human life,’ History of Dogmas, E.T., III., p. 10, 


106 THE EASTERN CHURCH [Iv 


and so a menace to Christ’s true divinity. If Christ be 
merely a man who received God, then His unique glory 
is gone. ‘‘ If he who receives God be very God, there would 
be many Gods, since many receive God.’’! ‘“ Even the very 
Greeks and Jews would accept it if we taught that He who 
was born was only an inspired man as Elijah was.’’? ‘To 
him the Antiochene juxtaposition of God and man in Christ: 
seemed impossible. ‘‘ If God had been joined to man, the 
perfect with the perfect, there would be two (perfects), 
one by nature Son of God, the other added.’’? Instead, he 
is concerned to teach the unity of Christ’s person. Christ 
is “‘God in the flesh.’’* And Apollinarius was ready to 
accept the full implicates of his view. The current psy- 
chology assigned free will to the mind, the vots. To 
Apollinarius it was incredible that Christ had the human 
freedom of will, for that would mean that the Word of God 
was changeable, and so could sin. Instead, he asserted 
that the Word took in Christ the place of the human mind.® 
‘* Just as a human person is composed of spirit and flesh, so 
was there in Christ a mixture of the human and the divine 
like the union between fire and metal in molten iron.’’® 
‘“‘ As a man is one person, though made up of spirit and flesh, 
so is Christ one person, and one nature, with one energy 
and one will.’’? 

Apollinarius’ view finds clear expression in his letter to 
Jovian, which was for long believed to have been written 
by Athanasius. ‘‘ There are not two natures, one to be 
worshipped and one not to be worshipped: there is one 


1 Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule, Fragment 83. Lietz- 
mann’s book is the best critical edition of the remains of Apollinarius’ writings, 
consisting partly of the quotations of his enemies, and partly of writings preserved 
from destruction through being assigned by his followers to orthodox divines. 

2 Lietzmann, Fr. 51. 3 Op. cit., Fr. 81. 4 Oeds &voapxos, Fr. 108, 

* Rufinus tells us that at first Apollinarius taught that Christ “ assumed only a 
body, and not a soul at all”’ and that it was only later that, adopting the tripartite 
psychology, he assigned to Christ not only a human body but an “ animal soul ” 
(Yvx7), whilst His mind (vods) or spirit (arve}ua) was divine. Raven holds that 
Apollinarius held from the first this later view (op. cit., 169-76). 

© Fr. 128. * Fr. 15], 


Iv} THE APOLLINARIAN CONTROVERSY 107 


nature of the Word of God incarnate, to be worshipped 
with the flesh in one worship.” Apollinarius saw clearly 
that “‘incarnation meant self limitation (kenosis),”+ and 
his view is thus surprisingly near to that of some of the 
modern ‘‘ Kenoticists.’’ Recent research has shown that 
he cannot be held responsible for the crudities assigned to 
him by his enemies. Thus he was accused of teaching that 
Christ’s flesh ‘‘ was from heaven,”’ and this libel on him 
still persists. Yet at the close of his letter to Jovian he not 
only denies that this is his teaching but anathematises 
this Gnostic view unjustly assigned to him. What he did 
teach was this: that the attributes of spirit and flesh, divine 
and human, are so truly united that he could say “the 
whole is from heaven because of the Godhead, and the 
whole from a woman because of the flesh : we recognise no 
distinction in the one person (prosopon), nor do we divide 
the earthly from the heavenly, nor the heavenly from the 
earthly, for impious is such division.’’? 

So in Christ there was a ‘‘ new creature and a marvellous 
mixture. God and man have constituted one nature.’’’ 
Christ is “‘ God invisible, changed in form by His visible 
body. God uncreate, made manifest by a created limita- 
tion, self-limited in assuming the form of a servant, un- 
limited, unimpaired in His divine essence.”* The person 
of Christ is constituted by the Logos, but the Logos is 
limited, and commixed with flesh. Christ’s full humanity 
was denied, but the unity of Christ’s person was secured. 

Apollinarius’ theory seems to have been new only in its , 
thoroughness. We have seen how little interest Athanasius 
took in the human nature of Christ. So far as his dominant 
conception of redemption was concerned—redemption from 
human corruption to divine incorruptibility—it would have 
sufficed if Christ had died as soon as He was born. The 
Word remained impassible, “‘ apathetic,” even when in- 


1 cdpxwots Kévwots, Fr, 124, * Lietzmann, p, 259 * Fr. 10. 
« Lietzmann, pp. 187, 188, Raven’s translation. 


108 THE EASTERN CHURCH [iv 


carnate, Time after time in his Orations against the Arians, 
he explains away anything which seemed to impair Christ’s 
divine dignity by asserting that it was the flesh and not 
the Word which thirsted, or hungered, was ignorant, or 
wept. ‘‘ These things are assigned to Him since they are 
proper to the flesh, and the body itself is proper to the 
Saviour.” When, in the later confusion of the Church, 
Gnostic views were revived, he expressed himself with 
greater care, and assigned, not to Christ’s body merely, but. 
to His manhood, those experiences which seemed to him 
incompatible with His divinity, and yet were too manifest 
in the Gospels to be explained away.? But Athanasius’ 
supreme interest was not in the problem of Christ’s 
humanity, but in the assertion of His true divinity, and 
he would not have been guilty of the tactlessness of raising 
a divisive issue when the conflict with Arianism was still 
undecided. 

It was probably because Apollinarius’ insistence on his 
views menaced the victory of Nicene orthodoxy that he 
was attacked with such vigour by the great Cappadocians, 
Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. 
Much of their polemic was, ill-informed and unjust. They 
assigned to Apollinarius vague Gnostic views he expressly 
repudiated, and were eager to have him condemned, lest 
Antioch and Rome should be offended. They failed to 
make clear what solution they had themselves to offer. 
In so far as their opposition was religious, and not ecclesias- 
tical, it is best summed up in Gregory of Nazianzus’ 
words: ‘‘ That which He has not assumed, He has not 
healed ; but that which is united to His Godhead is also 


1 Against the Arians, 3, 34. 

? See his Letter to Epictetus which, as we have seen, was wrongly supposed later 
to refer to Apollinarius’ views. The question whether Athanasius was an Apollin- 
arian has led, in recent years, to animated controversy between Drs. Gore and 
Rashdall. Raven remarks, ‘“ Christ is still the Logos, not a man, nor even in any 
true sense, man: the veil has been made a little thicker, that is all. Athanasius is 
still an Apollinarian at heart,” op. cit., p. 114. The two books against Apollinarian- 
ism assigned to Athanasius are almost certainly not his. 


Iv] THE NESTORIAN CONTROVERSY 109 


saved. If only half Adam fell, then that which Christ 
assumes and saves must be half also; but if the whole of 
his nature fell, it must be united to the whole nature of 
Him that was begotten, and so be saved as a whole. Let 
them not then begrudge us our complete salvation, or 
clothe the Saviour only with bones and nerves and the 
portraiture of humanity.”! Basil secured Apollinarius’ 
condemnation at Rome in 4.p, 377, and, two years later, 
he was condemned at Antioch. In a.pD, 383 an edict of the 
orthodox Emperor Theodosius declared Apollinarianism to 
be illegal, and in a.p, 388 strong measures were taken 
against it, at the instigation of Gregory of Nazianzus. 
Apollinarius seems to have died soon after, and many of 
his followers rejoined the Catholic Church. But the issue 
he had raised had been suppressed, not solved. 


The Nestorian Controversy. 

The great Cappadocians appear to have attacked Apol- 
linarius more because of his schism than his heresy, but to 
the leaders of the School of Antioch his views were alien 
and repellent. At Antioch a sober exegesis laid stress on 
the reality of Christ’s humanity. This they combined with 
Nicene orthodoxy, by asserting the existence in Christ of . 
two natures, one perfectly divine, the other perfectly 
human, conjoined, and yet distinct.2, Naturally they were 
in strong opposition to Apollinarius, but their opposition 
extended, not only to his views, but to the whole Alexan- 
drian approach to the problem of Christ’s person. This 
opposition came to a climax through the indiscretion of 
Nestorius, who has been justly called the ‘‘ pedant”’ of 
their School. 

A man of austere life, and eager zeal for truth, he was 
summoned in A.D. 428 from Antioch to become the arch- 

1 Epistle No. 101. This and his other letters bearing on the controversy are 
translated in Vol. VII of the Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, pp. 437-45. 


* Cp. the Confession of Faith of Theodore of Mopsuestia. Hahn, op. cit., 
pp. 302-4. * Seeberg, op. cit., II., p. 214. 


110 THE EASTERN CHURCH [iv 


bishop of the turbulent see of Constantinople. Heset about at 
once to purge it of all heresies. Soon he himself was charged 
with heresy. A dispute had arisen in Constantinople about 
the use of the term Theotokos, Mother of God.! Nestorius 
declared against the term, and suggested that the Virgin 
Mary should be called instead Christotokos, Mother of Christ. 
The term T'heotokos was a liturgical term and endeared to 
popular sentiment. The veneration of the Virgin Mary was 
a conspicuous part of popular piety, and to many simple 
believers the term expressed also faith in Christ’s full 
divinity. The enemies of Nestorius had now their chance, 
and, led by Cyril of Alexandria, accused him of holding 
views which were not his, Even the fragments of his works,? 
which, till recently, were our only source of information, 
are sufficient to show that he was innocent of many of the 
errors of which he was accused. There has now been found 
a great Apologia written by him, just before his death, on 
the eve of the Council of Chalcedon of a.p. 451.3 This 
book makes it clear that the traditional account of Nes- 
torius’ teaching owes as much to Cyril’s malice as to Nes- 
torius’ heresy, and that the condemnation of Nestorius was 
due less to his false teaching than to his own amazing 
tactlessness and the clever adroitness of Cyril, his great 
opponent. 

The story of the controversy could scarcely be more 
sordid. Yet behind it all there was a genuine religious 
interest. Nestorius tells us that he did not begin the 
quarrel about the term T'heotokos. He objected to it as 
unscriptural and going ‘‘ best with those who denied 
Christ’s true humanity.” Besides, ‘‘ it was a term which 


2 The word would be more accurately rendered not Mater Dei but Deipara or 
Dei Genitriz, “‘ she who bore God,” but the common translation “‘ Mother of God ” 
probably expresses its popular connotation. 

* Collected by Loofs in his Nestoriana, from which our references will be quoted. 

8 The Book of Heraclides, Discovered in a Nestorian library in Persian Turkestan 
in a Syriac translation its contents were first described by Prof. Bethune-Baker in 
his Nestorius and his Teaching, 1908. In 1910 a full French translation was issued 
by Nau (Le Livre d’ Héraclide de Damas), from which our quotations are taken, 


Iv] THE NESTORIAN CONTROVERSY 111 


enabled the heathen to mock at Christianity.’’! Yet he 
had not forbidden its use, and, preaching soon after the 
beginning of the controversy, declared ‘‘if any of you or 
any one else be simple and has a preference for the term 
Theotokos, then I have nothing to say against it: only do 
not make a Goddess of the Virgin.”? It was easy for an 
unscrupulous opponent to assert that Nestorius refused to 
call Mary the Mother of God, because he saw in Christ a 
mere man. Against this charge Nestorius passionately 
protests. ‘‘ When did I say that Christ was a mere man ? ”’ 
Nor was it true to say that he believed in a double Christ. 
*‘ There was one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son 
of God, one person (prosopon) resulting from the union of 
the two natures.”? ‘“‘I separate the natures, but I unite 
the adoration.’’* It is of interest to notice the defence 
Nestorius gives of the words which, as they were perverted, 
more than any other utterance of his won him execration, 
and enabled Cyril to get him condemned. ‘I will not give 
the name of God to one who was two or three months old.” 
His words, so reported, naturally confirmed the fears of 
those who thought that by rejecting the term T’heotokos he 
was denying Christ’s divinity. Nestorius tells us that what 
he really said was this, ‘‘ I do not say God is two or three 
months old’”’®—a statement which is not a novelty but a 
truism. A man may well deny that God is Christ, and yet 
assert that Christ is God. And that Christ was God, 
Nestorius was certain. ‘‘ He is no other than God the 


Word.” ‘He is God, and consubstantial with the Father, ~ 


and, at the same time, man, and consubstantial with us.’’® 

Nestorius thus conceived of two natures forming in per- 
sonal union the one Christ. Apollinarianism he strongly 
opposed. It seemed to him to impair, not the humanity 
alone, but the true divinity of Christ, and the teaching of 


1 Loofs, Nestoriana, p. 337. 2 Op. cit., p. 353. 
* Nau, p. 129, cp. Nestoriana, pp. 259, 284. « Nestoriana, p. 262. 
5 Nau, pp. 121-3. ¢ Nau, p. 132. 


112 THE EASTERN CHURCH [iv 


Cyril he opposed as Apollinarian in fact, if not in name.? 
A substantial union between the divine and the human he 
rejected, for that would involve an alteration in the Logos. 
To speak of such an alteration seemed to him blasphemous.? 
The incarnation took place “through an intelligent and 
rational soul.’’? Thus the Logos and the man were brought 
into a relation, “‘ a relation of giving on the one side and of 
taking on the other, a relation that becomes so close that 
the one presents himself as the other, and that the form of 
God shows itself in the form of a servant, and the form of 
a servant in teaching, acting, etc. in the name of God.’’ 
Professor Bethune-Baker has made the interesting sug- 
gestion that Nestorius was not a “‘ Nestorian,’ and should 
be counted orthodox. Loofs qualifies this judgement.® 
The definition of Chalcedon was based on Leo’s T'ome. 
We now know that Nestorius knew of this Z’ome in his exile, 
and approved of it heartily,® and, if the test of orthodoxy 
be the definition of Chalcedon as interpreted by Leo and 
the Westerners, Nestorius was no “heretic.” But Leo’s 
Tome was alien from the Alexandrian Christianity, and, as 
we shall see, Chalcedonianism was only accepted by the 
Alexandrians in so far as it was interpreted in Cyril’s sense, 
and the Fifth Gicumenical Council held at Constantinople 
in A.D. 553 not only endorsed the Cyrilian interpretation, 
but condemned, not Nestorius alone, but the writings of 
the best-known scholars of the School of Antioch. Judged 


1 Nau, pp. 86-8. 

2 Cp. the pathetic words at the end of his Apologia, in which he expresses his 
willingness to be anathema ‘‘if only Christianity does not confess with pagan 
impiety a change in God,” Nau, p. 323. * Nau, p. 83. 

“ Loofs, Nestorius, p. 92, basing on Nau, pp. 189-92. Loofs points out the 
similarity of Nestorius’ doctrine to the modern view of Kahler, to which we shall 
have later to refer. 

* His condemnation at Ephesus proves nothing, for “‘ an @icumenical Council of 
Ephesus never existed. Two party Councils had sat and cursed each other” 
(Loofs, op. c##., p. 53). The Union formula of a.p. 433, which confirmed the 
anathema on Nestorius, was one Nestorius could have signed. It was part of the 
price Cyril paid to get Nestorius condemned. For Cyril’s immense bribes to 
Court ladies and eunuchs with the same object, see his archdeacon’s letter, quoted in 
Kidd, op. cit., IIL, pp. 258, 259, * Nau, op. cit., p. 298. 


Iv] THE NESTORIAN CONTROVERSY 113 


by this later orthodoxy, Nestorius was a “‘heretic.” Yet, 
as Loofs points out, he was no innovator. He represented 
one great tradition of the Church—a tradition found, not in 
Antioch alone, but in large sections of the Western Church 
—and Loofs holds that, although judged a heretic, he was 
nearer to the oldest theological traditions and to the New 
Testament than the later orthodoxy itself. 

To Cyril, Nestorius was more than a hated rival: he was 
a dangerous heretic.1 Antiochene Theology preserved the 
full humanity of Christ, and, in its greatest teachers, 
asserted His full divinity. But Cyril, like Apollinarius 
before him, held that its approach to Christ’s person led 
logically to the belief that in Christ there was not the Word 
made fiesh, but a man inspired by God. Cyril’s own 
theology was substantially that of Athanasius. Apol- 
linarianism he sought to avoid, but he seems to have 
been more successful in evading its formule than in dis- 
carding its doctrines. He asserts, indeed, that the human 
nature of Christ was complete, and that Christ in taking 
a body took also a “rational soul,” but as he speaks of 
this humanity as ‘‘impersonal,’’? his concession to the 
orthodoxy which condemned Apollinarianism is more 
apparent than real. The two natures in Christ are 
in a “ physical’? union so complete that there is an 
“interchange of attributes”? between them, so that 
the impassible and incorruptible Word of God can be 
declared to have suffered death on our behalf. Yet, with 
this formula, which expresses his real religious interest, in 


1 As Tixeront says, ““We must take into account, not only the doctrinal 
divergencies, but also the violent antipathy which existed between the two parties. 
The Alexandrians had been extremely hurt by the decree of the Council of 381, 
which had deprived the see of St. Athanasius of its prerogative as the first see of the 
East and transferred it to Constantinople. On the other hand, at Constantinople 
and at Antioch, people recalled the unjust treatment inflicted on St. John Chry- 
sostom by Cyril’s uncle, Theophilus of Alexandria. In a word, both parties had 
humiliations and insults to avenge ; these facts contributed to render a dispassion- 
ate and amicable discussion of the questions at issue impossible from the very 
beginning,” History of Dogmas, E.T., UL, p. 35. 

* dvumdorartos, ‘‘ without hypostasis.” 


i 


114 THE EASTERN CHURCH [Iv 


deference to the School of Antioch, he combines the state- 
ment that the two natures remain unmixed and unchanged. 
This combination helped him to secure his victory, but, as 
Seeberg says, it makes “ his Christology, when scientifically 
considered, simply unintelligible.”! Christ is one, from 
two natures, not in two natures. His is ‘“‘ the one nature, 
made incarnate of God the Word.’? 

By assenting to the Symbol of Union of A.p. 433, and by. 
his enormous bribes, Cyril disarmed the hostility of the 
leaders of the School of Antioch and secured the condemna- 
tion of Nestorius. But almost immediately after Cyril’s 
death the controversy broke out anew, and this time it was 
one of his followers who was accused of heresy, Eutyches, 
head of a monastery near Constantinople, who expressed 
more bluntly his master’s views. Flavian, his archbishop, 
sought to restrain him, but Flavian had little influence at 
court,® and Eutyches had behind him Dioscurus, Cyril’s 
successor at Constantinople. Condemned by a synod at 
Constantinople for refusing to affirm that “‘ Christ is con- 
substantial with us according to the flesh, or that there are 
two natures after the union,’’ Eutyches appealed to Leo of 
Rome for redress.4 But the traditional theology of Rome 
asserted the true nature doctrine, and Leo, in his famous 
T’ome,® supported Flavian, and gave a Christological state- 
ment far nearer to views of Nestorius than of Eutyches. 
Leo’s Z'ome was ignored, and, at the ‘Robber Synod”’ at 
Ephesus in A.D. 449, Dioscurus secured the restitution of 
Eutyches and the deprivation of Flavian. His success was 


X\Op. ctt., IL, ps 233, 

2 ula pvots Tov Oeod Adyou cecapxwpéevyn. Cyril believed that this phrase came 
from Athanasius. Actually the letter to the Emperor Jovian in which it occurs 
was written by Apollinarius, though later assigned, for safety’s sake, to Athanasius. 

® He had failed to send the Emperor’s favourite eunuch golden “ eulogies,”’ 
Not until the eunuch lost power through the death of Theodosius II in a.p. 450, 
could Eutyches be condemned. 

4 Eutyches probably remembered that Nestorius had been condemned at Rome, 
but this condemnation was probably due to Nestorius, with characteristic mala- 
droitness, receiving some Pelagians, 

5 The Latin text is given in Hahn, op. cit., pp. 321-30. 


Iv] AFTER CHALCEDON 115 


transitory. The following year Theodosius II died, and his 
sister, who succeeded him, was a supporter of Flavian. A 
great council was summoned at Chalcedon in a.p. 45] 
which sought to end, once for all, all controversy about the 
nature of Christ. 

The discussion at the Council began with the reading of 
the Creed of the Council of Niczea and the Creed assigned 
to Constantinople,! two letters of Cyril written with official 
caution,? and the Ziome of Leo. After long and fierce dis- 
putes the Imperial Commissioners succeeded in getting 
carried a definition which owed something to Cyril’s more 
diplomatic utterances, but which owed most to Leo’s Tome, 
Its crucial clause declares that ‘‘ we all teach, with one 
accord, one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ . . . 
who for us men, and for our salvation, according to the 
manhood, was born of the Virgin Mary, the God-bearer 
(T'heotokos), one and the same Christ, Son, Lord—only 
begotten, confessed in two natures, without confusion, 
without change, without division or separation. The 
difference of the natures is in no way denied by reason of 
their union; on the other hand, the peculiarity is pre- 
served, and both concur in one Person and one Hypos- 
tasis.”® As at Nicswa, Imperial support and Roman 
influence had enabled a minority to triumph. And 
Chalcedon, like Nicwa, was to show how illusive are 
victories thus won. 


After Chalcedon. 


The followers of Cyril refused to accept the Definition of 
Chalcedon, and there were uprisings in Egypt, Palestine, 
and part of Syria, so violent as to menace the security of 
the Empire. The history of the Eastern Church in the 
next two centuries is largely the history of the attempts 

1 See earlier, p. 103. 


2 His second letter to Nestorius and his letter to John of Antioch. 
® Kidd’s trans., op. cit., IIL, p. 326. 


116 THE EASTERN CHURCH [iv 


made in the interests of Imperial unity to find some com- 
promise? which should make it possible to retain connexion 
with the West, and yet to pacify the East by reconciling 
the Monophysites, who, claiming to be the true followers 
of Cyril, held, in opposition to the Definition of Chalcedon, 
that there was only one nature (phusis) in the incarnate 
Christ. What was needed was some solution which would 
reaffirm Chalcedonianism in name but would interpret it 
in Cyril’s sense, This was found at last in the Aristotelian 
Scholasticism of Leontius (c. A.D. 485-543) and his suc- 
cessors, who taught that the human nature of Christ 
although not an independent hypostasis was not, as Cyril 
taught, without hypostasis, for it found its ‘‘ hypostasis in 
the Word.’’* In this way it appeared possible for Chal- 
cedonianism to be formally affirmed, and yet Cyril’s theology 
maintained. It was with this in view that the great 
Emperor Justinian sought to secure peace for his distracted 
Empire by condemning the theology of Antioch, first by 
an edict and later at the Fifth Gcumenical Council, which 
met in A.D. 553 at Constantinople, when the Chalcedonian 
formula was reaffirmed, but explained in Cyril’s sense, 
with the aid of the new orthodoxy. Here, too, the com- 

1 E.g. the Henoticon issued by the Emperor Zeno in 4.D. 482, which, while con- 
demning both Nestorianism and Eutychianism, renewed Cyril’s anathemas, and 
declared that the Faith of Niczwa alone was obligatory and forbade preaching on 
disputed points, It failed to reconcile the extremists on either side, and, b 
ignoring the Chalcedonian Definition, led to a breach with Rome which lasted till 
the Henoticon was recalled by Justin I in 519 a.p. 

* This doctrine of Enhypostasia as taught by Leontius and John of Damascus 
is attractively described by Dr. Relton, A Study in Christology*, pp. 69-93, who sees 
in it not only “the furthest point reached by the ancient Christology”’ but the 
only hypothesis “ adequate to cover the revelation in the Person of Christ.” 
** Upon no other theory can we continue to speak of His having possessed ‘ Two 
Natures’ and yet as having but a single consciousness, This is the only theory 
which suggests a way of escape from the pitfalls of Nestorianism and Mono- 
physitism, the only passage open to us between the two alternatives of a duplex 
personality and an impersonal manhood ; unless we are content to halt amidst the 
absurdities and contradictions of a complex Divine-human personality,” op. cit., 
pp. 266, 268, On the other hand, Harnack sees in it only a means by which “ the 
Chalcedonian dogma is lost in philosophic theory,” and remarks that a pious 
Apollinarian monk would probably have been able to say of it, ‘‘ Apollinarius 


says pretty much the same thing only in somewhat more intelligible words,” 
History of Dogma, IV., p. 234. 


Iv] GAIN OR LOSS ? 117 


promise failed. The West was estranged and the Mono- 
physites not reconciled. 

At length a new device was tried. The Emperor Heraclius 
on the advice of Sergius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, 
sought to pacify the Monophysites by a formula which said 
that the God-man, though consisting of two natures, 
worked through one divine human energy, and in A.D. 633 
some Monophysites accepted this compromise.! But a 
fresh controversy ensued. Honorius, the Bishop of Rome, 
who had agreed to the formula, suggested that, for “‘ one 
energy,” “one will”’ should be asserted.* But there was 
further strife, and an Imperial edict was issued forbidding 
further discussion. The West would not consent to silence, 
and a Western Council added to the Chalcedonian creed 
clauses which assigned to Christ ‘two natural wills’? and 
“two natural operations.” ? The Emperor Constans II 
replied by persecution, but, to retain the allegiance of the 
West, anew Emperor called together the Sixth Gicumenical 
Council, which met at Constantinople in a.p. 680 and 681. 
Once again Rome conquered. This Council adopted the 
definition of the West, thus making dyothelitism—the 
doctrine that in Christ were two wills—a dogma of the 
Church. 


Gain or Loss ? 


The Councils had done their work, and the orthodox 
doctrine of Christ’s person had received its final form. Had 
the result brought gain orloss? That is a question to which 
it is hard to give a simple answer. In words which have 
often been quoted, Dr. Hatch has pointed out the ‘‘ differ- 
ence of both form and content between the Sermon on the 
Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount 
is the promulgation of a new law of conduct; it assumes 

1 For the Formula of Union see Hahn, op. cit., pp. 338 f. 

2 Hence the controversies are called the “ monergistic ” and the “‘ monothelite ’’ 


controversies. 
.* The Lateran Council of 649 a.p, Forits text see Hahn, op. cit., pp. 238-241. 


118 THE EASTERN CHURCH [Iv 


beliefs rather than formulates them ; the theological con- 
ceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather 
than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are 
wholly absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly 
of historic facts and partly of dogmatic inferences; the 
metaphysical terms which it contains would probably have. 
been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have no 
place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, 
the other to a world of Greek philosophers.’’} 

The contrast is indeed, as Dr. Hatch says, “a patent 
one.’ But it would be unfair to the Greek Church to speak 
of its dogmas simply as a sophistication of the Gospel. 
Life, it has been said, means response to environment. It 
was inevitable that, in a Greek world, Christianity should 
receive a Greek orientation, and that its doctrines should 
be brought into some sort of relation to the philosophy of 
the age. Many have echoed Gibbon’s sneer that the long- 
drawn-out Arian controversy was just a “‘ furious contest ”’ 
over “‘ the difference of a single diphthong.”’? Few scholars 
would support that view to-day. Arianism was an impos- 
sible compromise. The worship of a demi-God is idolatry, 
and, if Arianism had won, it is hard to see how Christianity 
could have survived the criticism of the centuries. It was 
the greatness of Athanasius that he saw the religious 
interest involved, and fought for the Nicene faith, not as 
a pedant, but as one who knew that only a Saviour truly 
divine could be adequate for the world’s redemption. The 
Nicene faith has remained the faith of the Christian Church 
—a faith as firmly held in churches unbound by creeds as in 
churches which give to the creeds a statutory value. The 
Sermon on the Mount is not just simple ethics. It assumes 
that Christ has in men’s lives an absolute authority, both 
now and in the world to come, and the intellectual implicate 

1 The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, p. 1. 

* The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, XXI. In a footnote he adds “‘ the 


difference between the Homoousion and the Homoiousion is almost invisible to the 
nicest theological eye.”’ 


Iv] GAIN OR LOSS ? 119 


of this is some such declaration as the Creed of Nicwa made 
in the categories of its age and place. But behind the 
Creed there lies, as the word homoousion! reminds us, a , 
philosophy more pagan than Christian, a philosophy of 
‘“‘ being,’ not of personality. The peril of this reliance on 
an unchristianised philosophy became patent in the dis- 
putes about Christ’s true humanity. With a metaphysics 
which was ontological and not ethical, it was impossible, 
in any intelligible sense, to retain Christ’s personal unity 
and yet assert with Christian faith that the Christ, whom 
the Church confessed to be its Lord, was also truly man. 
The Council of Nicza had set a bad precedent. Convened 
by Constantine, its decisions were enforced by imperial 
decree. Eusebius, the courtly historian, in speaking of 
the banquet the Emperor gave the assembled bishops— 
‘“men of God proceeding without fear into the innermost 
of the imperial apartments, in which some were the Em- 
peror’s own companions at table, while others reclined on 
couches arranged on either side ’’—naively remarks, ‘‘ One 
might have thought that a picture of Christ’s kingdom was 
thus shadowed forth, and a dream rather than reality.’’? 
But Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, and the Church 
lost more than it gained through allowing uniformity of 
doctrine to be enforced by the civil power. We must not 
speak, indeed, as if the orthodox had any monopoly of 
persecution. In the Arian controversy almost incredible 
barbarities were committed by Arians who had for the time 
the imperial patronage. Apollinarius excommunicated 
others before he was himself excommunicated, and Nes- 
torius was a persecutor of heretics before he himself suffered 
as a heretic. The unity of the Church no longer depended 
upon faith in Christ, but on an assent to dogmatic formule, 
which was the condition, not of Church communion only, 


‘ 


2 On homoousion “ co-essential,”’ or, as the Prayer Book translates, ‘‘ of one 
substance with,” see earlier, p. 100. 
| # Lnfe of Constantine I11, 15, 


120 THE EASTERN CHURCH {iv 


but of civil rights. Instead of seeking to unify opposites 
by the discovery of a larger and reconciling truth, ecclesias- 
tical leaders sought, by the force of the state, to have their 
opponents silenced and their views suppressed.} 

The decision of Chalcedon, like the decision of Nica, 
has been confirmed by the experience of the Church. Its 
definition was not an innovation; it was an attempt to 
avoid two partial extremes. Nicza had rejected the 
mythological idea of a half-God. Chalcedon rejected the 
mythological idea of a half-man,? and declared that Christ 
was both truly Godandtruly man Religiously it succeeded, 
better than either of the views it condemned, in combining 
together these two prime Christian facts. But in the Kast, 
its victory was a forced one, and the categories it employed 
are inadequate. They involve, as the Sixth Council 
recognise, the assertion of two wills in Christ, and thus 
made unintelligible the personal unity which is formally 
asserted. 

The events in the Kast between the Fourth and the Sixth 
Councils show the peril of enforcing by law a creed which 
is not the natural expression of a people’s faith. And, 
while the leaders of the Church elaborated their ‘‘ anatomical 
Christology,’’? and anathematised those who differed from 
them in their answers to a problem which, with their 

1 Lest this criticism should be regarded as a mere denominational prejudice, it 
may be well to quote the weighty words of Monsignor Duchesne, the great Roman 
Catholic historian: ‘‘ In the second century, after various alarms, the Gnostic 
crisis had ended by subduing of itself. Christianity had eliminated the morbid 
germs by the mere reaction of a vigorous organism, Later on the Modalist move- 
ment, after having agitated the Churches everywhere to a certain extent, in Asia, 
at Rome, in Africa, Cyrenaica and Arabia, had gradually been extinguished and 
confined to a few adherents, There had been no necessity for council, or emperor, 
or creeds, or signatures, The dispute between Origen and his bishop, vigorous 
enough at the outset, had ended by settling itself without external interference. 
But in this affair with Arius, the strongest measures were called into requisition ; 
and the only result was a truce of very short duration, followed by an abominable 
and fratricidal war, which divided the whole of Christendom, from Arabia to Spain, 
and only ceased at last, after sixty years of scandal, by bequeathing as a legacy 
for generations to come the germs of schisms, the effect of which the Church still 
feels,” The Early History of the Church, IL., p. 124. 


* Cp. Seeberg, op. cit., IL., p. 266. 
* J owe this phrase to A, B, Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ, p. 89. 


Iv] GAIN OR LOSS? 121 


philosophy at least, was incapable of solution, Islam was 
born, and by the time of the Sixth Council, great Christian 
lands had become Muhammadan, It needs a subtle mind, 
indeed, to combine Cyril with Chalcedon ; and, in John of 
Damascus,! in whom Greek theology took definitive form, 
we find a presentation of Christology, lacking in unity and. 
simplicity, and with disparate elements held together only 
by scholastic refinements. By then, theology had become 
a “sacred mystery.’’ God was declared triune, but He 
was not primarily the God known and loved in Jesus 
Christ, but the great Unknown of Neo-Platonic thought? ; 
and Christ Himself had become so far removed from the 
common walks of life that images were needed as objects 
of devotion. When the Seventh Gicumenical Council met,? 
it was to legalise the veneration of these icons. Christ had 
been called God, but the concept of God was not Chris- 
tianised. Christ’s manhood had been asserted, and yet 
He had become so remote from men that popular piety 
had turned from the adoration of our Lord to the veneration 
of His image, or the image of the Virgin, or the saints. 

1 He died before a.p. 754. A translation of his great book, T'he Exposition of the 
Orthodox Faith, is given in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. (X. 

* Neo-Platonism had been revived through the writings of the Pseudo- 
Dionysius the Areopagite, which greatly influenced Christianity after the close of the 


fifth century. 
* At Nica in a.p. 787. 


V 


THE CHURCH OF THE WEST TO THE 
REFORMATION 


THE Western Church to the Reformation contributed little 
to the interpretation of the doctrines of Christ’s relationship 
to God and man. The answers to these problems seemed 
clear. The triune God was one “substance” in three 
‘‘ persons’; the incarnate Christ had two natures, being 
both God and man.! These were the certain dogmas of 
the Church, to be accepted as part of that obedience to the 
Church which was the prime duty of every Christian man. 
Arians and Apollinarians, the heretics of the East, were 
attacked, but attacked, as Seeberg says, “‘ as if they were 
strange fools who did not understand what, in the West, 
even catechumens knew.’’? The predominant interests of 
the West were practical, not speculative, and even its 
‘heresies’? were concerned with such problems as the 
place of the Church, and the nature of man. 


St. Augustine. 


Although the West shared with the East in the dogmas 
of the Trinity and the Incarnation, it gave them a fresh 
significance by bringing them into relation with its peculiar 
interests. Of supreme importance here was the influence 
of St. Augustine (a.D. 354-430). Devout Catholic and 
Neo-Platonist, great Churchman and restorer of evangelical 
piety, Augustine was not only the child of the ancient 
Western Church, but the father of both the medieval and 


1 See earlier on Tertullian, p. 86. * Op. cit., I., p. 365, 
122 


Vv} ST. AUGUSTINE 123 


the Protestant Churches. For the doctrine of the Person 
of Christ, Augustine has a double significance, He gave 
to Western orthodoxy the final form of the doctrine of the 
Trinity. He discovered in the manhood of Christ a meaning 
for men’s salvation, which counterbalanced the abstractness 
of dogma; and revived an interest in the historic Christ, 
which inspired the choicest piety of the Middle Ages, and — 
prepared the way for that rediscovery of the Gospel later, 
which meant the Reformation. 

To the doctrine of the Trinity, Augustine devoted one 
of the most elaborate of his treatises. In the East, the 
formulation of this doctrine sprang from the Arian con- 
troversy. Against the assertion of Christ’s inferiority, the 
Church maintained that He was “of one essence”? with 
God, and so reached the formula of the later Nicene 
orthodoxy that God was one ‘“‘essence’’ with three 
““hypostases.”” But Augustine begins, not with the 
manifoldness, but the unity. It is with the unity of God, 
as his presupposition, that he sets out to explain how “ the 
Trinity is the one and only and true God, and also how the 
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are rightly said, 
believed, understood, to be of one and the same substance 
or essence.’! He rejects every kind of subordinationism. 


“The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit . . . are one 
and the same substance in an indivisible equality.”* Nor 
is there any difference of will or operation.... “The will 


of the Father and the Son is one, and their working 
indivisible.’’? The distinctions within the Godhead are 
relative. The Father is not called Father in relation to 
Himself, nor the Son, Son in relation to Himself ; for that 
would involve a difference of substance. The terms, 
Father and Son, are thus used reciprocally, and in relation 
each to the other. Thus Augustine, in his formal teaching, 


* On the Trinity, I. 2. References are made by chapters, not paragraphs. 
Translations are from The Works of Augustine, edited by Marcus Dods. 
2 Op. cit., I. 4. 3 Op. cit., 11. 5. “ Cp. op. cit., V. 5. 


124 THE WESTERN CHURCH [v 


conceives of one God, existing in three eternal ‘‘ modes ”’ 
or ‘“relations.’’ Tertullian had described these by the 
terms “‘ persone,’ meaning by the word “ persona”? much 
less than we mean by ‘“‘ person.” Augustine adopts his 
word, but only for lack of a better term. ‘‘ When the 
question is asked, what three? human language labours 
altogether under great poverty of speech. The answer, 
however, is given, three persons, not that it might be 
spoken, but that it might not be left unspoken.’’? 

The famous analogies Augustine used to illustrate the 
doctrine, show how firmly he asserted the divine unity. 
We have, he says, in our own mind a kind of trinity in 
‘“memory, intelligence, and will.’”’? Or, again, there is 
‘“he who is loving, and that which is loved, and love.’’® 
But the doctrine of the Trinity was to Augustine a sacred 
mystery, and, in the prayer which concludes his work, he 
makes it clear that all that he had tried to do was, after 
having accepted the doctrine as a “‘rule of faith,” “‘ to see 
with his understanding, what already he had believed.’’* 

Augustine’s treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity 
is thus speculative, not religious. He begins, not with the 
historic Christ, and with the implicates of faith in Him 
as the risen and pre-existent Lord, but from the dogma 
of the Church, which he had somehow to reconcile by 
speculation with his belief in the absolute unity of God. 
His teaching finds familiar expression in the majestic 
cadences of the so-called ‘‘ Athanasian’’ Creed, a Western 
creed, which, whatever be its age or place, is, in its doctrine 
of the Trinity, a summary of Augustine’s views. 

It is as the reformer of the Church’s piety that Augustine 


1 Op. cit., V. 9. Augustine points out that the Latin translation of the Greek 
formula would be “ one essence, three substances,”’ but “* that by essence, we under- 
stand the same thing which is understood by substance; we do not dare to say 
one essence, three substances, but one essence or substance and three persons.” 

2 Op. cit., XIV. 6. 

* Op. cit., IX. 2. Those who to-day see in the Trinity a Divine Society naturally 
adopt this illustration of the lover and the beloved. But Augustine spoke, not of 
love for another, but of love for oneself, and the thought of a Divine Society was 
far from his mind. * Op. cit., XV. 28. 


v] ST. AUGUSTINE 125 


made his most significant contribution to the Church’s 
understanding of the meaning of the Incarnation for 
practical religion. Sometimes, indeed, he fails lamentably 
to Christianise his thought of God. This converted Neo- 
Platonist speaks often as if the soul could be satisfied by 
‘the flight of the alone to the Alone,” so that the highest 
experience of religion was a mystic union with God as 
simple being, in which the meaning of Christ is forgotten, 
or ignored.! And his teaching on “‘irresistible”’ grace is 
irreconcilable with Christ’s thought of God, for grace, 
which is irresistible, is the caprice of a tyrant, not the love 
of the Father, Christ revealed.? But Augustine had learnt 
from Monica, his mother, that love of Christ which has been 
the glory and the safety of the Western Church, and, as he 
himself tells us, no philosophy could ever take complete 
hold of him, except it had the name of Christ. 

Augustine asserts in strongest terms the two-nature , 
doctrine. In the manhood of Christ he delights to see, © 
at once, the supreme instance of God’s grace, and an 
example of humility for us to follow. ‘‘ What merit had 
the human nature in the man Christ earned, that it should, 
in this unparalleled way, be taken up into the unity of 
the person of the Son of God? ... Now wherefore was 
this unheard-of glory conferred on human nature—a glory, 
which, as there was no antecedent merit, was of course 
wholly of grace—except that here those who looked at 
the matter soberly and honestly might behold a clear 
manifestation of the power of God’s free grace, and might 


1 In the chapter in Dom Cuthbert Butler’s recent and valuable book on Western 
Mysticism dealing with Augustine as the ‘‘ Prince of Mystics,” there is scarcely 
a reference to Christ. The only thing distinctively Christian is this, that in the 
moment of vision there is discerned “ how true are the Articles of Faith that have 
been enjoined,” p. 69, 

* The number of the elected is fixed. The rest are predestined to punishment (see 
Enchiridion, 100). 

* Confessions, III. 4. ‘‘ This name of my Saviour, thy Son, had my tender heart 
piously drunk in, deeply treasured even with my mother’s milk; and whatsoever 
was without that name, though never so erudite, polished, and truthful, took not 
complete hold of me.” * Cp. Enchiridion, 35, 


126 THE WESTERN CHURCH [v 


understand that they are justified from their sins by the 
same grace’ which made the man Christ Jesus free from 
, the possibility of sin.”! So far from being ashamed of the. 
‘humility of Christ, Augustine rejoices in it. It is the 
manifestation of God’s love to us, and the inspiration to 
lives of love and service. ‘‘ It was mainly for this purpose 
that Christ came, to wit, that man might know how much 
God loves him ; and that he might learn this, to the intent 
that he might be enkindled to the love of Him by whom 
he was first loved, and might also love his neighbour.” 
Thus the ‘‘ Lord Jesus Christ, God-man, is both a mani- 
festation of divine love towards us, and an example of 
human humility with us.” ‘‘ Here is great misery, proud 
man. Here is greater mercy, a humble God.’’? It was on 
this humility that he loved to dwell. The Platonists had 
taught him what God’s nature is. They could not teach 
him the “charity which builds upon a foundation of 
humility, which is Jesus Christ.”’? Thus Augustine does 
not share the Greek reluctance to assert Christ’s real 
humanity. It is “just in proportion as He is man, that 
He is mediator.’”’* Man’s fall was through pride; God 
restored him through the humility of Christ.® 

Augustine had no coherent system. His greatest con- 
tribution was not to theology, but to religion. As Harnack 
says, ‘‘he taught men to realise the horror of the depth 
of sin and guilt.’ ‘‘ He took religion ... out of its 
congregational and ritualistic form, and set it in the hearts 
of individuals as a gift and a task. He preached the sincere 
humility which blossoms only on ruins—the ruins of self- 
righteousness.’ By thus revealing the need of man, he 
helped to keep alive in a legal Church the quest for God, 
and not merely for God’s gifts, and maintained for Christ 
a place, not only in the dogmas of the Church, but in 


1 Enchiridion, 36. * From On Catechising, 4. * Confessions, VII. 20 
4 Confessions, X. 43 (in quantum enim homo, in tantum mediator). 
8 On Christian Doctrine, I, 14. * History of Dogma, Y. p. 65. 


v] THE MIDDLE AGES 127 


the living experience of men who found in the humble, 
human Jesus their example and their peace. 


The Middle Ages. 


The Middle Ages are generally dated from about 4.D. 600. 
In the first centuries of the period the Church was absorbed 
in the task of disciplining the new peoples that had become 
Christian. There was little development of doctrine, but 
an enormous growth in the power of the Church as the 
sole mediator of salvation, and of the priesthood which 
could absolve men’s sin on their confession, and alone 
perform the wonder of the mass by which the elements 
were transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ.? 
The Middle Ages reached their climax between a.pD. 1050 
and 1308, a period marked by the growth of a new piety, 
and of a scholasticism which sought to express the traditions 
of the Church in a dialectic which was regarded as the 
grandest intellectual achievement of the age. But even 
in the period of its greatness, the Middle Ages contributed 
little to the interpretation of the doctrine of Christ. The 
decisions of the “‘ four ”’ great councils of the Church were 
accepted, and the explanation of the sacred mysteries of 
the Trinity and the Incarnation was found in the so-called 
Athanasian Creed, which was by now regarded as the 
authoritative commentary on the ancient symbol of the 
West, the Apostles’ Creed. 

The doctrine of Christ’s person received, then, not a new 
interpretation, but a new setting. We have a conspicuous 
illustration of this in the most famous Western book on 
the work of Christ, the Cur Deus homo? of Anselm,? in 


1 So later, the Fourth Lateran Council of a.p. 1215, whose decisions were in the 
Western Church ranked next in authority to that of the three creeds, made the 
doctrine of Transubstantiation a dogma of the Church, and declared that only a 
regularly ordained priest could perform the mystery, and, at the same time, enacted 
that all persons who had reached years of discretion must confess to the priest and 
do penance ; whilst the Bull Unam Sanctam, issued by Boniface VIII in a.p. 1302, 
pronounced that no man could be saved except in obedience to the Roman Pontiff. 

? a.d. 1033-1109. 


128 THE WESTERN CHURCH [v 


which the work of Christ was interpreted in terms of feudal 
ideas of justice, and the penitential discipline of the Church. 
Anselm’s theory had serious defects. Although he recog- 
nises that God’s glory demands that men be brought to 
beatitude,! for the most part, he speaks as if God were an 
‘* offended party,”’ seeking full redress for the damage done 
to His honour by men’s sin. It is Christ’s love which is 
prominent ; not the love of the Father, who obtains in 
Christ’s unmerited death infinite satisfaction for the debt 
due from men. Christ gives; God receives. Christ loves ; 
God seems hard and stern. Such a theory fails to Chris- 
tianise the idea of God, and tends to introduce into the 
Godhead a dissimilarity of character more serious in its 
effect than the Arian assertion of a dissimilarity of essence. ? 
But the theory, for all its failure, did tend to make Christ’s 
succour real. God might seem remote and terrible, but 
Christ had put Himself on men’s side, paid their debt, and 
won their gratitude. In this the theory is typical of much 
of the theology of the Western Church. In the formal 
treatment of Christ’s person, His humanity is generally 
obscured. It is “‘impersonal,’’ and unlike our own. But 
in the interpretation of Christ’s work, Augustine’s dictum 
is remembered that ‘‘ He is mediator, just in so far as He 
is man,’ and thus His manhood is brought into relation 
with our redemption. 


St. Bernard. 


This love for Jesus found its supreme expression in the 
devotional writings of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (A.D. 1091- 
1153), A great Churchman, and a conservative theologian, 


1 TI, 4, 

? As any theory must fail which is derived, as Anselm claimed his to be, by genera 
considerations, “ setting Christ aside (remoto Christo) as though He had never been.’’ 
Dr. Coulton remarks, “ It was a feudal God who dominated the Middle Ages. He 
had too often the oaprice, the cruelty, and even the superb unconscious ignorance 
of a feudal lord. The Lady came into the Court of Heaven to soften this. But she 
herself had definite feminine failings ; and the rest of that feudal-religious house- 
hold of minor divinities . . . tailed off into creatures hardly distinguishable from 
Ovid’s nymphs and fauns,” Five Centuries of Religion, I. 189. 


v] ST. BERNARD 129 


he had attacked Abelard for reducing, as he thought, the 
meaning of Christ’s death to a manifestation of God’s love 
and the love of Christ. Yet this protagonist of orthodoxy 
seems to have fed his own soul, less on the dogmas of the 
Church, than on meditation on the love of Jesus. 
St. Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs have their prime 
importance as a great classic of Catholic piety, but they 
are of interest also from the standpoint of Christology. In 
the piety of Augustine, as we have seen, there were two 
notable elements : the Neo-Platonic mysticism which sought 
to know God and the soul and nothing else, and the emphasis 
on the humility of Christ. In St. Bernard these two are com- 
bined, and mysticism becomes Christo-centric. The union 
sought is union with Christ as the Bridegroom of the soul. 
It is a union possible only for the spiritually mature—those 
who, as he puts it, have become “ marriageable.’’! 

The familiar mystic way is described by St. Bernard 
under the figure of the three kisses. There is first the kiss 
of the Bridegroom’s feet when “‘ we fall at the feet of the 
Lord, and lament before Him who has made us the faults 
and sins which we ourselves have committed.’’ There is 
next the kiss of the hand, when “ we seek His helping hand 
to lift us up, and to strengthen our feeble knees that we 
may stand upright.’? And last, there is the kiss of His lips 
when we “venture to lift our eyes to that countenance 
full of glory and majesty, for the purpose not only to adore, 
but (I say it with fear and trembling) to kiss, because the 
spirit before us is Christ the Lord, to whom, being united 
in a holy kiss, we are by His marvellous condescension 
made to be one spirit with Him.’’? 

Such love-talk has been very strongly condemned.? 
“SETS * III. 5. Quotations are from Eales’ translation. 

’ For the criticism of Ritschl, that very virile Christian, on this love-dalliance 
see his Justification and Reconciliation, I1., E.T., pp. 593-5. Heiler makes the 
interesting suggestion that mystic piety is feminine i in type, whilst prophetic piety 
is masculine. Thus in St. Bernard, the soul takes the place of the bride, and a 


mystic, like Eckhart, declares that “‘ Woman is the soul’s noblest name,” Heiler, 
Das Gebet', p, 258. 


I 


130 THE WESTERN CHURCH [v 


Even in St. Bernard, love to Christ is a very different thing 
from that faith in Him which finds in St. Paul its classic 
expression, and, in monks and nuns less robust than 
Bernard, this love-dalliance was often morbid and patho- 
logical. Like other mystics, Bernard found that the mystic 
rapture was followed by “dryness” of the soul, and 
confesses that his times of union with the Bridegroom were 
rare and short in duration.1 But Bernard realised many 
of the perils of the mystic way, and praised the active life 
as more necessary than the contemplative. The embrace 
of the Bridegroom is meant to bring fecundity. It is not 
well ‘‘ to linger too much over the sweetness of contempla- 
tion, for the fruits of preaching are the better.”? And 
Bernard is not indifferent to the place and work of Christ. 
“The name of Jesus ’’ is to him ‘“‘ as honey in the mouth, 
as melody to the ear, as a song of gladness to the heart.” 
But it is also ‘‘ medicine,” a sure cure for sadness and for 
sin. “‘ For when I utter the name of Jesus I set before 
my mind, not only a man, meek and humble in heart,” 
. .. but also “the Almighty God, who both restores me 
to spiritual health by His example, and renders me strong 
by His assistance.” And, at times, St. Bernard speaks of 
salvation with a certainty more evangelical than catholic. 
*“ Where, in truth, is there a firm and safe refuge for us 
who are weak, except in the wounds of our Saviour ? 
There I dwell in safety so much the greater, as He is so 
powerful to save. The world rages around me, the body 
weighs upon me, the devil lays snares for me; but I do 
not fall, for I am founded upon a firm rock. Perhaps 
I have committed some great sin, my conscience is troubled, 
but I do not despair, because I remember the wounds 
of my Lord ; for He was wounded for our iniquities. What 
sin is there so deadly that it may not be remitted through 


1 XXIII 15. In his discussion of the bedchamber of the Bridegroom. 

* IX. 8. Following Augustine and Gregory the Great, Bernard sees the con- 
templative and active life typified in Rachel and Leah, and remarks, “although 
Rachel is the fairer, Leah is the more fruitful.” XV. 6. 


v] ST. THOMAS 131 


the death of Christ ?”! Thus St. Bernard could claim 
“My philosophy is this, it is the loftiest in the world: to 
know Jesus and Him crucified.”’? And in the love of Christ 
he saw the love of God. “The heart of the Bridegroom 
is the heart of the Father, and of what character is that ? 
Be ye therefore merciful, He says Himself, as your Father 
also is merciful.’’§ 

Beautiful and attractive as is St. Bernard’s type of 
devotion, it cannot be regarded as classic, if judged by the 
norm of apostolic experience. But we have only to turn 
to the official theology of the period to realise how much 
the Church owed to those who, in any way, kept alive its 
devotion to a living Lord. And the love to Christ of which 
St. Bernard wrote with such poignant beauty found actual 
embodiment in the life of such a man as St. Francis, whose 
radiant life of poverty and love is one of the greatest 
glories of the medieval Church. 


St. Thomas of Aquino. 


This new piety found but scant expression in the formal 
Theology of the period. The Crusades had brought the 
West into more intimate relation with the East, and there 
was a revival of Aristotelianism. It was the work of the 
Schoolmen to express the whole tradition of the Church 
in the categories of this “‘ New Learning.” Greatest of 
them all was St. Thomas of Aquino (4.D. 1224-74), whose 
system is to-day authoritative, not only for the Dominican 
Order to which he belonged, but for the whole Roman 
Church. His vast work, the Summa Theologica, adds 


2 LXI. 3. * XLITI. 4. * LXII. 6. 

“ For a comparison between faith and love, I would venture to refer to the 
chapter on Christianity and the Way of Devotion in Redemption: Hindu and 
Christian, by the present writer. 

* The Encyclical Alterni Patris, issued by Leo XIII in 1879, proclaimed St. 
Thomas as the great model and master of Catholic Philosophy and Theology, and 
in 1917 Benedict XV added to the Codex of Canon Law the rule that “ the study 
of philosophy and theology and the teaching of these sciences to their students 
must be accurately carried out by Professors [in seminaries, etc.] according to the 
arguments, doctrine, and principles of S. Thomas which they are inviolately to 
hold.”’ See the Dominican translation of the Summa Theologica, I, xxxiii. 


132 THE WESTERN CHURCH [Vv 


little, if anything, to the interpretation of the doctrine 
of Christ’s person, but it is significant, not only as the 
classic expression of Catholic theology, but as the model 
which later Protestant orthodoxy was to copy. Reason 
and authority are brought into relation. Reason gives, 
with the aid of Aristotelian philosophy, a natural theology. 
Authority adds to that the revealed theology of the Church. 
So, instead of beginning with Christ, and through Christ 
reaching out to the meaning of God, St. Thomas begins 
with a God defined by a pagan philosophy, and relates to 
this the Christian Gospel. Thus, in the first part of his 
vast treatise, by general considerations which owe nothing 
to Christ, God’s existence, simplicity, perfection, goodness, 
infinity, eternity and unity are “ proved,’’! and even God’s 
love is discussed without reference to His gift of Christ.? 

To the doctrine of God thus reached by the natural 
reason, there is added the doctrine of the Trinity. In the 
section dealing with this,* St. Thomas continues the 
tradition of Augustine, asserting strongly the divine unity. 
The plurality is a plurality of relations, which is, at the 
same time, a plurality of ‘* persons.” 

In his discussion of the Incarnation, St. ‘Fhomas indulges 
in some speculations which seem to menace a full Christian 
faith. Each of the divine Persons, he asserts, could have 
become incarnate,* and the Incarnation was not necessarily 
final or exclusive. ‘ After the Incarnation the Father can 
still assume a distinct human nature from that which the 
Son has assumed ; for in nothing is the power of the Father 
or the Son lessened by the Incarnation of the Son. There- 
fore it seems that after the Incarnation the Son can assume 
another human nature distinct from the one He has 
assumed.”’® In general, Thomas reflects the tendency we 
have already noted in the Western Church. In the treat- 
ment of Christ’s person, His humanity appears shadowy 


1 T., Qa. i-xi. * T., Q. xx. 3 1., Qq. xxvii-xliii. ¢ TIL., Q. iii. 5. 
5 III, Q. iii. 7. Quotations are given from the Dominican translation. 


v) ST. THOMAS 133 


and unreal; in the treatment of Christ’s work, His / 
humanity gains importance as the means by which He 
won for us merit, and became mediator between God and 
man. Apollinarianism is formally condemned. The Son 
assumed not only a carnal body and soul, but a human | 
mind.4 Yet the incarnate Christ had neither faith nor 
hope,? for, from the first instant of His conception, He had 
the full knowledge of the blessed. He was born without 
pain to His mother or Himself, and, even in His birth, 
Mary remained a virgin.? So little did He share our real 
humanity that His prayers were merely uttered for didactic 
purposes. ‘‘ Being both God and man, He wished to send 
up prayers to the Father, not as though He were incom- 
petent, but for our instruction. First, that He might show 
Himself to be from the Father,’ and “‘ secondly, to give 
us an example of prayer.’®> Such a Christ seems far 
removed, indeed, from the Jesus of the Gospels. It is 
little wonder that men fell back on the intercession of the 
Virgin Mary and the Saints. Yet, when St. Thomas passes 
on to deal with Christ’s work, he brings Christ nearer to 
us, and, by presenting Him as the Head of the Church, 
brings Him into relation with those He came to save. Yet 
even here there is uncertainty. Christ made, he tells us, 
a “‘superabundant ”’ satisfaction for the sins of the race.® 
But the praxis of the Church assumed that the satisfaction 
of Christ only availed for pre-baptismal sins, and Thomas 
teaches that for sins after baptism some ‘‘ punishment or 
suffering ’’ must be endured, although “ by the co-operation 
of Christ’s satisfaction, much lighter penalty suffices than 
one that is proportionate to the sin.” 


3 TIT. Quit * IIL, Q. v 

© TEL; Quix, . 2 and Q. xxxiv. 4. Christ at His eerie ve pe the full knowledge 
of the comprehensores, those who enjoy already the Beatific Vision in contrast to 
the faithful on earth who are viatores, “‘ wayfarers,”’ “‘ pilgrims.” In Q. xv. 10, 
Thomas states that Christ was in a sense a viator too, in that His soul was “ passible,’’ 
and His body “ both passible and mortal.” 

4 IIL, Q. xxviii. 2 and Q. xxxv. 6. + TIL Os xxi d, 

* JIL, Q. xiviii..2. *. TIL ,. Qi xlix, 3. 


134 THE WESTERN CHURCH {v 


It is impossible to read St. Thomas’ great work without 
realising the consummate dialectical skill with which he 
answers all objections, and, by general considerations and 
quotations from the Scriptures and the Fathers, maintains 
the traditional doctrines of the Church. And he was a man 
as devout as he was learned.1 Yet how little does his vast 
work express the certainty and simplicity of Christian 
faith. The most vital doctrines of the Gospel are put 
by the side of curious, and even offensive, speculations 
about the ‘‘ matter from which the Saviour’s body was 
conceived,’’? or of fanciful discussions about how much 
the angels know, and how they move.* Faith becomes 
assent to whatever the Church teaches, and much that the 
Church taught was irrelevant to men’s salvation. And 
this vast and heterogeneous structure of traditional 
orthodoxy is built upon the foundation of a natural 
theology, reached by an unchristianised philosophy. 

To St. Thomas, reason and revelation seemed perfectly 
at one. But, before the medieval period ended, the 
medieval synthesis was already in dissolution. Duns Scotus, 
the great teacher of the Franciscan Order, emphasised 
God’s arbitrary will, and this emphasis received violent and 
paradoxical expression in William of Occam, who taught 
that God could have saved us in any way He liked, and 
could just as well have assumed the nature of ass, or stone, 
or wood.4 To the humanists of the Renaissance, Aris- 
totelianism seemed not new learning, but old. The 
excessive dogmatism of the great Schoolmen had lost its 
attraction, and the arid discussions of a decadent Scholas- 
ticism were held up to ridicule. Yet Christianity lived, and 


1 He wrote not only his great treatises, but the beautiful Eucharist hymn, 
Adoro te devote (Heiler, Das Gebet*, p. 329). 

2 JIL, Q. xxxi. * T., Qq. liii-lviii. 

Duns Scotus (f 4.D. 1308) and William of Occam (f A.D. 1349) were both 
English teachers. William of Occam and the other Nominalists are of importance 
as Luther was trained in their school, and learnt thus to put the authority of the 
yee over that of the Church, and to distrust the Aristotelianism of Thomas of 

quino. 


v] ST. THOMAS 135 


neither a frigid Theology nor a corrupt Church could 
destroy entirely the remembrance of the holy life of Christ ; 
and true saints still found in the remembrance of His 
sufferings the solace of a quiet heart. In the fourteenth 
century, Monastic piety received its noblest and most 
famous form in the Imitation of Christ, assigned to Thomas 
& Kempis,! in which the love of Jesus is depicted in words 
of moving beauty, whilst outside the monasteries, there 
was, in Germany especially, a revival of lay piety in which 
fear of God and love of Christ were often strangely mingled. 


1 See especially De Imitatione Christi, Book II, chapters vii (De amore Jesu super 
omnia) and viii. (De familiari amicitia Jesu), 


VI 
THE REFORMATION 


l.—TuHE LUTHERAN CHRISTOLOGY 


Luther (A.D. 1483-1546). 


LUTHER is important for our purposes, not as a formulator 
of new doctrines, but as the restorer of that experience 
of Christ which it is the task of Christology to express. 
He brought to the Church, not a fresh theology, but 
a rediscovery of saving faith, faith which has one object 
only, God revealed in Jesus Christ. 

It is impossible to understand Luther’s work without 
some reference to his early history. Brought up in the 
stern piety of a peasant home, Luther was taught to fear 
God, rather than to love Him,? and it was this fear of God 
which drove him in 4.p. 1505 into the Augustinian Monas- 
tery at Erfurt. The Schoolman most in repute there was 
William of Occam, a sharp critic of the medieval synthesis 
of faith and reason ; and a bold assertor of the supremacy 
of the Bible over the teachings of the Church. Luther 
studied his works diligently, and at the Bible laboured 


1 For Luther’s development before the beginning of the Reformation we have 
now the elaborate works of Strohl, L’Hvolution Religieuse de Luther jusqwen 1515 
and L’H'panouissement de la Pensée Religieuse de Luther de 1515 & 1520. A lucid 
summary for the same period is given in Loofs, Leitfaden der Dogmengeschichte*, pp. 
684-740. Useful catene of passages from his writings will be found in Scheel, 
Dokumente zu Luthers Entwicklung bis 1519, and in Rinn and Jiingst, Dogmen- 
geschichtliches Lesebuch, pp. 330-84, and Kirchengeschichtliches Lesebuch*, pp. 
178-264. 

# Even Christ he thought of chiefly as an avenging judge, and he tells us later 
how “‘ he shivered whenever he looked at the stained-glass window in the parish 
church, and saw the frowning face of Jesus, who, seated on a rainbow, and with a 
flaming sword in his hand, was coming to judge him, he knew not when,” Lindsay, 
A History of the Reformation’, I, p. 194, 


136 


vi] LUTHERAN CHRISTOLOGY | 137 


long and hard. Later he could claim that no monk had 
sought more eagerly than he “‘ to come to heaven through 
monkery.”’ But toil and fasting did not bring him peace. 
Christ was still to him the stern judge from whom he 
~ would flee, yet could not flee. Staupitz, the wise Vicar 
of the German province of Augustinians, sought to comfort 
him by bidding him not trouble so much over imaginary 
sins and inscrutable problems. ‘If you wish to dispute 
about predestination, begin with the wounds of Christ 
and it will cease. . . . We must remain in the Word, in 
which God is revealed to us, and salvation offered, if we 
believe Him. But in the thought of predestination, we 
forget God, cease to praise Him, and begin to blaspheme. 
But in Christ all treasures are hidden; apart from Him, 
they are closed to us.”! But that was a lesson which 
Luther found hard to learn. 

Luther began to study Augustine, and gained from him, 
and from St. Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, a 
greater trust in God. He was sent to Rome in a.p. 1510 
to represent his Order there.* On his return, he began to 
lecture on the Bible, and for his development in the next 
few years we have the evidence of his lectures on the 
Psalms and the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians. 
He had learnt that faith means trust in God’s mercy, and 
that by faith alone, can men be justified ; but not yet did 
he think it possible to be sure of God’s salvation.? In 
these lectures, Luther revealed his aversion to the Scholastic 
Theology. The Schoolmen had learned from Aristotle to 


+ From Luther’s Table Talk, Weimar Edit. of Tischreden, IT., p. 582. 

2 Luther told his little son in a.p. 1544, that it was as he ascended the Lateran 
staircase in Rome that there came to him Paul’s words, “‘ The just shall live by 
faith” (Scheel, op. cit., p. 2), but it seems unlikely that by that year Luther had 
reached the full understanding of these words, 

* ** Never can we know whether we are justified, whether we believe,’’ Schol. on 
Rom. iii. 22 (Scheel, op. cit., p. 109), Notes on this course on Romans were dis- 
covered in the Vatican by Denifle, the Jesuit scholar. The whole work has since 
been published by Ficker from a MS. found in Berlin, Luthers Vorlesung iéiber den 
Rémerbrief, 1908. I have been unable to get access to this book, and so have to 
give references to it from Scheel, or Rinn and Jiingst, 


138 THE REFORMATION | [v1 


speak of divine things and to handle the name of God 
‘‘ without awe.”! He sought to lead his students away 
from the Schoolmen and Aristotle, to the Bible and 
Augustine, that, instead of ‘‘ wasting precious time on 
foolish studies on the what and the why of things,” they 
might ‘‘learn Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”? By 
A.D. 1517 Luther had reached a full understanding of faith’s 
function, and, when lecturing on Hebrews in that year, 
declared that one thing alone ‘‘ can take away the con- 
sciousness of sin, faith in Christ, for the victory is given 
us, through Jesus Christ.’’$ ) 

Till this year, A.D, 1517, Luther had been absorbed in 
the quest for certainty of salvation and in spreading the 
knowledge thus gained, by preaching and teaching. But 
Tetzel came to Wittenberg, hawking his indulgences. 
Luther attacked their sale in the famous Ninety-five Theses, 
which he posted on the door of the University Church. 
He made his protest as a loyal son of the Church, and was 
amazed at the tumult his act created. The step once taken 
could not be retraced, and by the time of his debate with 
Kek in a.pD. 1519, Luther realised that his controversy with 
the Roman Church involved more than an excrescence of 
Church practice. There was a fundamental antagonism 
between his conception of salvation by faith in the grace 
of God revealed in Christ, and the Roman conception of 
salvation, earned by works, or obtained by the favour 
of the Church from the accumulated and marketable 
merits of the saints. The one involved the Christian liberty 


1 On Psalm lxvi. 17, Weimar Edit., III., p. 382. Luther’s aversion to the old 
theology was shared by many of his age. Thus Dean Colet, in a letter to Erasmus, 
wrote, ‘‘ Why do you extol to me such a man as Aquinas? If he had not been 
exceedingly arrogant, he would not with such rashness and pride have defined 
everything ; and, unless his spirit had been somewhat worldly, he would not have 
so contaminated the whole teaching of Christ with his profane philosophy.” 

* Schol. on Rom. viii. 19, Rinn and Jiingst, Kirchengeschichtliches Lesebuch®, 

. 188.: 
. $ Loofs, op. cit., p. 711. Strohl holds that three years before this, Luther had 
reached full certainty, and quotes in proof of this a letter he wrote to the Fathers 
at Erfurt in 1614 (L’ Hvolution Religieuse de Luther jusqu’en 1615, p. 173). 


vi] LUTHERAN CHRISTOLOGY 139 


and priesthood of every believing man; the other made 
possible the vast complex of contemporary Catholicism. 
In the following year, Luther stated, boldly and plainly, 
the implicates of his new understanding of religion,’ and, 
with his burning of the Pope’s Bull of excommunication, 
the breach with Rome was made complete, and the German 
Reformation had begun. 

Luther’s movement, then, had its origin, not in scepticism X& 
but in faith ; not in a criticism of traditional dogmas, but 
in a rediscovery of the Gospel. We have here no innovation 
in doctrine, but an immense reduction, a concentration on 
the one article of saving faith in Christ. There is nothing 
new here, yet it made all things new. The grace of God 
in Christ was entirely adequate for the believer’s needs. 
Christ was not just the greatest in a celestial court of saints 
and intercessors. He filled for the Christian the whole 
horizon. He was the one Saviour, the sole and certain 
revelation of the Father’s heart. 

The three cecumenical symbols Luther retained, and 
revivified by his faith the ancient formule. For him, as 
for Athanasius, the Divinity of Christ was not just 
a doctrine of the Church. It was the one guarantee of 
men’s salvation. Thus, in his Larger Catechism, he 
declared: ‘‘ We could never recognise the Father’s grace 
and mercy except for our Lord Christ, who is a mirror 
of His Father’s heart.’’? And in his exposition of the 
second article of the Apostles’ Creed, in the same Catechism, 
he writes, ‘‘ Now, when it is asked : what dost thou believe 
in this second article concerning Jesus Christ ? answer 
most briefly thus: I believe that Jesus Christ, the true 
Son of God, has become my Lord. And what do the words 
to become thy Lord mean? They mean that He has 
redeemed me from sin, from the devil, from death and all 

1 In his three great Primary Treatises, 7'o the Christian Nobility, On the Baby- 
lonian Captivity of the Church, and On Christian Liberty. 


* Luther’s Primary Works, etc., E.T. edited by Wace and Buchheim, 2nd edit., 
p- 106. 


140 THE REFORMATION [v1 


misfortunes. . . . So the main point of this article is, that 
the little word Lord, taken in its simplest sense, means as 
much as Redeemer ; that is, He who led us back from the 
devil to God, from death to life, from sin to righteousness, 
and holds us safe.’’! 

For speculations about God’s nature, such as the School- 
men, the ‘‘ Sophists,”’ indulged in, Luther had only aversion. 
“True Christian divinity,’ he writes in his Commentary 
on Galatians, ‘“‘ commandeth us not to search out the nature 
of God, but to know His will set out to us in Christ.’ 
‘Know that there is no other God but this man Christ 
Jesus.’’ ‘‘ Embrace Him and cleave to Him with thy whole 
heart.” ‘‘ Look on this man Jesus Christ, who setteth 
Himself out to be a mediator, and saith, ‘Come unto Me 
all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will refresh 
you.’ Thus doing thou shalt see the love, goodness and 
sweetness of God; thou shalt see His wisdom, power and 
majesty, sweetened and tempered to thy capacity.”? In 
a sermon on John xiv. 23-31, Luther puts still more clearly 
the value he found in Christ as the revelation of the Father. 
‘* The devil can bear it, if men cling to the man Christ, and 
go no further ; yea, he will also let us speak and hear the 
word that Christ is truly God. But then he will not have 
it that a heart is able to connect Christ and the Father so 
closely and inseparably that it shall count His word and 
His Father’s to be one word, heart and will. Just as 
darkened hearts do think and say: yes, I hear with what 
friendliness and comfort Christ speaks to the troubled 
conscience, but who knows how it stands between me and 
God in heaven ? That means, then, that the heart has not 
counted God and Christ all one, but has made for itself 
a Christ apart by Himself, and a God apart from Himself, 
and has bartered away the true God, who wills to be found 
and laid hold of nowhere save in this Christ.”* We have 


1 Op. cit., pp. 99, 100. 2 On Gal. i. 3, from the final edition. 
§ Herrmann, 7'he Communion of the Christian with God, E.'1T.*, p. 157. 


vi} LUTHERAN CHRISTOLOGY 141 


only to contrast the approach to God through Christ these 
words reveal, with Thomas of Aquino’s speculations on 
God’s nature, to understand Luther’s complaint that, 
although the Roman Church had preserved the dogma 
of Christ’s divinity, it had never imagined ‘“‘ that we ought 
to learn to recognise God in Christ.’’} 

Although Luther had no liking for the word “‘homoousion,”’ 
or of *“‘ mathematical terms’”’ like “‘ Trinity,” he retained 
the ancient formule, and used them as an expression of his 
new experience. He complained of the ‘‘ Sophists,’’ the 
Schoolmen, that they “had depicted Christ as God and 
man, had counted his bones and arms and mixed His 
natures wonderfully together—but that is only a sophistical 
knowledge. Christ is not named Christ because He has 
two natures. What meaning has that for me? But He 
bears His lordly and comforting names because of the 
office and work He has taken on Himself.’”’ Yet none have 
related more intimately to experience the doctrine of 
Christ’s two natures in one person. He was man, needing 
to eat and drink and sleep as other men, sharing human 
tears and human laughter.? The incidents of His life have 
more than historic interest. They are “ living things which 
make us alive.’’* And this man is God. Only one divine 
could be adequate for our salvation. ‘‘ If I saw in Christ 
only a man, crucified and dying for me, so were I lost.’’4 
Of His Godhead Luther was certain. ‘‘I have had,’ he 
writes, ‘““so many experiences of Christ’s divinity, that 
I must say: either there is no God, or He is God.’> The 
union of God and man in Christ was complete. The divine 
became human, and the human divine. We cannot speak 
of the divine in Him without the human, or of the human 


1 Herrmann, op. cit., p. 157. 
* Cp. the passages quoted in Schultz, Die Lehre von der Gottheit Christi, pp. 207, 
08 


* Res viventes ut vivificent nos, Hnarratio Psalmi, II., a.p, 1532, Weimar Edit., XL. 
11, p. 259. For parallel passages see Seeberg, op. cit., [V., pp. 179-84. 

‘ Schultz, op. cit., p. 196. 

* From the 7'able Talk, Weimar Edit. of Tischreden, I., p. 269. 


142 THE REFORMATION [vr 


without the divine. We belong to Christ, and Christ to 
us. All that He has is ours, and all that is God’s is His. 

Such was Luther’s great contribution—a contribution, 
‘not primarily to theology, but to religion. ‘‘God and 
faith,” as he put it, ‘“‘ belong together.’”’ In the person 
of Jesus Christ, God is revealed, and faith in Christ is not 
just an assent to one of the many dogmas of the Church ; 
it is trust, a child-like confidence which liberates from all 
tyrannies, and inspires to all service.1 Luther often fell 
below his best, and his worst was very bad; and he 
indulged unduly in boisterous paradoxes, which still em- 
barrass his admirers, and give delight to those who hate 
the Reformation. He left behind him problems, not 
solutions. He failed himself fully to Christianise his idea 
of God,? but he showed the way in which our thought of 
God may be made fully Christian. The supreme problem 
he has bequeathed to the Protestant Church is this: to 
express in theology the simplicity of his religion—not to 
speak as if God were known apart from Christ, so that 
it is sufficient to call Christ God and man ; but, beginning 
with the historic Christ, to learn from Him what God is 
like, that so if we call Christ God, it may be the God of 
Christ we mean by God, that, thus knowing Christ, we 
may learn from Him to Christianise our thought of God 
and man. 

That is a task which Protestantism for long failed even 
to attempt. The supreme religious intuition of Luther 
was, for the most part, ignored, and not until the nineteenth 
century was there any adequate endeavour to express in 
theology Luther’s rediscovery of the Gospel. Such a failure 


+ Cp. the paradox which forms the text of his great tract, On Christian Liberty, 
‘* A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian 
man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.” 

2 Bug. his retention of the idea of the “‘ hidden God ” (‘* Deus absconditus’’), and 
his uncertainty whether this ‘‘ hidden God”’ was entirely one in character with the 
God revealed in Jesus Christ. With great probability, Otto suggests that Luther 
retained this thought of the “ hidden God,” because it expressed his intuition of 
awe, his sense of the mysteriwm tremendum as well as fascinosum of the Holy. 
Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Chap. XII. 


vt] LUTHERAN CHRISTOLOGY 143 


was as natural as it was lamentable. It was an age of 
controversy, and the leaders of the Evangelical Church, in 
their conflict with a purified and remodelled Catholicism, 
sought to meet orthodoxy by orthodoxy, and to systema- 
tise the doctrines of their faith by a scholasticism as 
burdensome as that which Luther had opposed. 

Melancthon is of great interest here. The first edition 
of his Loci Communes,! published in a.p. 1521, a year after 
Luther’s Primary Treatises, expresses with extraordinary 
clearness the rediscovery of Christianity which marked the 
first years of the Reformation, and the concentration at 
that period on the practical issues of religion. ‘‘ The 
mysteries of the Godhead,” he writes, ‘‘ are not so much 
to be investigated as adored. It is useless to labour long 
on the high doctrines of God, His unity and trinity, the 
mystery of creation, the mode of the incarnation. I ask 
you what have scholastic Theologians reached, who for 
many centuries have been occupied only with these 
doctrines. . . . We could be silent about their folly, were 
it not that, through their foolish discussions in the mean- 
time, the Gospel and the benefits of Christ have been 
obscured. . . . To know Christ is to know His benefits, 
not as they (the Schoolmen) teach, to contemplate His 
natures, and the modes of His incarnation.’’? These words, 
which have become the watchword of much modern 
theology, are not to be found in the later editions of his 
book. Instead, the scholasticism thus rejected was 
restored. Christianity was once more intellectualised, and 
faith interpreted, not only as trust, but as assent to “‘ pure 
doctrine.” 

Nowhere was this relapse into scholasticism more 
conspicuous than in the arid controversies about the Person 
of Christ, which long troubled the Lutheran Church. For 

1 Edited by Plitt-Kolde, 3rd edit., 1900. 

* Hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia eius cognoscere, non, quod ists docent, 


eius naturas, modos incarnations contuert. For the whole passage see Plitt-Kolde, 
op. cit., pp. 60-4. 


144 THE REFORMATION {vt 


these controversies Luther, not Melancthon, was respon- 
sible. We have seen with what vividness Luther spoke 
of the human life of Jesus. His manhood was a real man- 
hood ; His flesh like ours, except for sin. It would have 
been well for Luther and his followers, if he had remembered 
his own warning that ‘‘we should do better to leave 
dialectics and philosophy to their own spheres, and learn 
to speak with a new tongue in the kingdom of faith.” 
Instead, in his eagerness to express the perfect unity of. 
the human and divine in Christ, he fell back on a scholastic 
formula as inappropriate as any he had attacked. Cyril 
of Alexandria, as we have seen, had sought to vindicate 
the unity of Christ’s person by teaching that there was a 
*“communication of attributes’ between the human and 
the divine natures in Christ. This doctrine received a 
further development in William of Occam, who explained 
the real presence of Christ at the Communion by the 
transference to His body of the divine attribute of 
“ubiquity.” Luther, who had been trained at Erfurt 
under Occamist influences, adopted this difficult theory 
and spoke as if, by this ‘“‘communication of attributes ” 
(‘‘communicatio idiomatum.’’), the man Jesus shared in 
the divine omnipotence, although that omnipotence was 
kept hidden till the Resurrection, whilst the unity of the 
person was such that it could be said that the same person 
who ruled the world was ill-treated by men and Satan. 
This theory received an exaggerated importance through 
Luther’s conflict with Zwingli about the Lord’s Supper. 
Zwingli, in his eagerness to avoid what he regarded as 
the superstition of the Mass, taught that Christ was present 
at His table, only ‘‘ by the contemplation of faith,’ and 
not “‘in essence and reality.” To Luther, Zwingli’s view 
seemed quite inadequate, for it failed to express his con- 
viction that the Christ who brought to us forgiveness of 


! Schultz, op. cit., p. 205. 
2 Cp. Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte*, IIL, pp. 664, 665. 


vt] LUTHERAN CHRISTOLOGY 145 


sins, is present at the Communion to reaffirm for us His 
redeeming act.1 The Roman doctrine of the Mass Luther 
had rejected as ‘‘ magic,” and as making the Communion 
man’s work, not God’s. By his doctrine of the “ com- 
munication of attributes,’’ Luther was able to assert the 
real presence of Christ’s body at the Communion. The 
glorified body of Christ partook of the attributes of the 
divine. So it was not limited to one place in heaven. It 
was “‘illocal,’’ ubiquitous, spiritual, and so could be 
partaken in, with, and under the bread—by believers for 
their benefit; by unbelievers for their condemnation. 
The theory not only caused division among the Reformers. 
It was inappropriate, if not entirely contradictory, to 
Luther’s strong assertion of Christ’s real participation in 
our human need and sorrow, His growth in knowledge, 
and in obedience to His Father’s will, His agony in 
Gethsemane and on the Cross. It is true that in the 
explanation of the Communion Service the theory is 
applied only to the “ state of exaltation.” But Luther did 
not restrict his theory to the explanation of the Communion 
Service, but used it in reference to Christ’s earthly life. 
It seems hard to reconcile Luther’s teaching of Christ’s 
human development with this theory that. His humanity 
had from the first all the attributes of the divine, whilst to 
say that the attributes thus received were kept concealed, 
was not to explain, but to inerease the sense of unreality. 

At the Marburg Colloquy of a.p. 1529 Luther had so » 
far forgotten his own principle that justification by faith 
was the one essential doctrine of the Church, as to refuse 
to recognise Zwingli and his friends as brothers, because, 
although they had signed all the other articles of the 
Confession then compiled, they could not sign the article 
which expressed the Lutheran doctrine of the Communion. 
Melancthon became later less enamoured of Luther’s 
doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s body, and saw, more 

1 Cp. Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte*, LV., pp. 382-8. 
K 


146 THE REFORMATION [v1 


clearly than Luther ever did, the need of unity among the 
Reformers. The way to peace was made easier by the 
triumph in Switzerland of Calvin’s interpretation of the 
Communion, which emphasised more strongly than 
Zwingli’s had done, the real presence of Christ to faith 
at the Communion Table. In a.p. 1540 Melancthon, on 
his own responsibility, altered a clause in the Confession 
of Augsburg, formulated ten years earlier, in order to make 
it acceptable to those who held Calvin’s view of the 
Communion. So long as Luther lived, his action was, in 
part, condoned, and some sort of peace preserved, but, 
when Luther died in 4.p. 1546, those who claimed pre- 
eminently to be his followers, attacked violently what they 
called the Crypto-Calvinism of Melancthon and his school. 
In a.D. 1559 Brenz sought to make the doctrine of the 
ubiquity of Christ’s body a test of orthodoxy, and the 
controversy became so bitter that when Melancthon died 
in the following year, it was with a sense of relief that he 
thus escaped “‘ from the fury of theologians.” 

To Brenz, the coming of Christ meant not only the 
incarnation of the divine, but the deification of the human.! 
The human nature of Christ had an “‘ immense and infinite 
capacity,” so that the Word, without suffering any altera- 
tion, could impart to it of the fullness of the Godhead.? 
So the Son of Man was from the beginning “ adorned with 
all the divine majesty,” and His human nature had the 
attributes of the divine. Although thus, in “the form 
of God,” the Son of Man hid these qualities by an act 
of will, so that the incarnate Christ was at once in “the 
form of God and in the form of a servant.’ The personal 
unity was such that the manhood was inseparable from 
the Godhead, and thus, at the Resurrection, the human 


1 His Christological views find full expression in his two writings, De personali 
unione duarum naturarum in Christo, 1561, and De divina maiestate domini nostri 
Jesu Christi, 1562. See Seeberg, op. cit., IV., pp. 514-9. 

* In this way Brenz could rebut the illud extra Calvinisticum, the Calvinistio 
theory that the divine Logos was not enclosed in the incarnate Christ, but still 
continued in heaven the cosmic functions. 


VI] LUTHERAN CHRISTOLOGY 147 


nature of Christ, exalted with the divine to the right hand 
of God, was above the limits of time and space, so that 
Christ’s body could be partaken at the Communion service. 
The view of Brenz was the logical completion of Luther’s 
theory of the Sacrament; but it obviously made unreal 
the humanity of Christ. A more moderate theory was 
advanced by Chemnitz, who held that the human nature 
of Christ received the attributes of the divine, but only 
in human measure. In this way he was able to give some 
meaning to the growth in knowledge which marked Christ’s 
human life. But his theory lacked consistency, for he, too, 
subordinated his doctrine of Christ to Luther’s inter- 
pretation of the Communion, and, although he denied in 
strong terms the ubiquity of Christ’s body, yet taught 
that it could be in any place at the will of the divine 
Word‘ and so could be partaken at the Communion service. 
A compromise between the two views was sought in the 
Formula of Concord of a.p. 1577 ; but it was a compromise 
which failed to satisfy either party, and the controversy 
between the schools of Brenz and Chemnitz was followed 
by the long strife between the Tiibingen and Giessen 
theologians. They were at one in asserting that Christ 
possessed, even at birth, the divine attributes, but they 
differed as to their use. The Tiibingen theologians held 
that the incarnate Christ made a secret use of the divine 
attributes ; the Giessen theologians taught that, save in 
His miraculous works, Christ voluntarily renounced their 
use,” and thus, by a less consistent theory, were able to 
make of Christ’s humanity something more than a mere 
illusion. 


1 The ‘‘ ubivolipraesentia”’ of Christ’s body. 

* Hence the Tiibingen school spoke of a krupsis, a concealment, and the Giessen 
school of a kenosis, an emptying, an abandonment, of their use. The best account 
in English of old Lutheran Christology is given in Bruce, T’he Humiliation of 
Christ, pp. 107-48. Full quotations will be found in Thomasius, Christi Person und 
Werk, 11., pp. 282-484, 


148 THE REFORMATION [v1 
II.—Tue REFORMED CHRISTOLOGY 

In the Reformed Churches the doctrine of Christ’s person 
received a simpler and more Biblical expression. 

The contrast between Lutheranism and Calvinism is 
expressed in part by the contrast between Luther and 
Calvin. Luther was a man of the people, a religious genius 
of vivid intuition and paradoxical speech, conservative, 
caring little for systematic thought, and desiring reform, 
only in so far as reform was necessary to preserve his 
rediscovery of religion. Calvin! was one of the greatest 
scholars of his age, lucid in thought, and precise in speech, 
a consummate theologian, who sought to bring all Christian 
faith and practice into one coherent synthesis. Luther’s 
religion may be understood by any one who will trouble 
to read his Primary Treatises and Catechisms, but his 
theology evades description. It is scarcely too much to 
say, that to speak of the “‘ Theology of Luther ”’ is to use 
a phrase without meaning. What we have in his writings 
is not a theology, but statements of doctrine, which cannot 
be articulated into a system, but are the naive expressions 
of his vivid intuitions. Luther was a prophet with the_ 
prophet’s temperament ; Calvin was a theologian, a man 
of apt and accurate learning, whose theology can be readily 
studied in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, a book 
which, as Ritschl said, was “ the masterpiece of Protestant 
theology,’ and which ranks among those few great 
systematic treatises which still repay the most careful 
study. 

It is significant that the first edition of his Jnstitutes, 
published in a.p. 1536 when Calvin was a young man, was 
concerned.chiefly with the practical problems of Christian 
life.* In this short first sketch of what was afterwards 


1 a.D. 1509-1564, 

2 This first edition is reprinted in the Corpus Reformatorum, Vol. XXIX. It 
deals with (1) the Law given in the Decalogue, (2) the Faith of the Apostles’ 
Creed, (3) Prayer and especially the Lord’s Prayer, (4) and (5) the Sacraments, true 
and false, (6) Christian Liberty, ecclesiastical power, and political administration. 


vi] REFORMED CHRISTOLOGY 149 


a massive work, “‘ Calvinism ” in its popular sense has but 
little place. In the second, and greatly enlarged edition, 
of A.D. 1539, it became prominent. It was not his discovery. 
He learnt it, as he believed, from Paul; he found it 
unmistakably in Augustine. It gave him the confidence 
that behind the Church’s work for God was God’s power. 
It was an expression of his own sense of ‘‘ creaturehood,”’ 
his absolute dependence upon God. For Calvin, as for 
Augustine, humility was the distinctive element of Christian 
piety. The standard of all conduct was God’s glory, and 


every Christian doctrine was to be interpreted from the | 


point of view of God’s sovereign grace.?, The God whose 
mercy he had experienced through Christ was the active 
and omnipotent ruler of the world, so that the supreme 
task for him, and every Christian man, was to know God, 
and serve His purposes. 


It is from this standpoint, then, that Calvin’s doctrine « 


of Christ is to be studied. There isin it no novelty. What 
is new is a new emphasis, and a new orientation, To 
Calvin the Bible was not only the very word of God, but - 
the sole test of truth, and he accepted the ancient creeds, 
not on the authority of the Church, but as correct tran- 
scripts of Bible religion. 


1 The development of thought in the successive editions is clearly traced in Wernle. 
Der Evangelische Glaube nach den Haupischriften der Reformatoren, II., Calvin. 

* Hastie, following Schweizer, remarks, “‘ Lutheran Protestantism . . . asked » 
the question, What is it in man that wins salvation ? and gave the answer, Not, 
works but faith; whereas the Reformed Protestantism asked, Who is it that 
saves, the creature or God ? and answered God alone, salvation being consciously 
referred to its ultimate source in the foreordaining and determining will of God,’ 
The Theology of the Reformed Church, p. 145. 

* Cp. Calvin’s Confession of Faith in the Name of the Reformed Churches of 

France, Articles 3 and 4. “ On all the articles which have been decided by ancient 
Councils, touching the infinite spiritual essence of God, and the distinction of the 
three persons, and the union of the two natures in our Lord Jesus Christ, we 
receive and agree in all that was therein resolved, as being drawn from the Holy 
Scriptures, on which alone our faith should be founded, as there is no other witness 
proper and competent to decide what the majesty of God i is but God Himself. . 
We détest all the heresies which were of old condemned. Cod forbid that we 
should be. troubled with those reverics which troubled the Catholic Church at the 
time when it was in its purity,” Z'racts, Vol. IL, E.T. by Beveridge for the Calvin 
* Translation Society, p. 141. 


in Pa | 
5s 


150 THE REFORMATION [v1 


Calvin’s views receive their fullest expression in the final 
edition of his Institutes, published in a.p. 1559, in which 
the whole of Christian theology is dealt with under the 
four main divisions of the Apostles’ Creed. His statement 
of the doctrine of the Trinity is thus to be found in the first 
book which deals with God the Creator. In the first edition 
of the Institutes, he had employed with some reluctance 
the “‘exotic’’ terms of the Creeds, although recognising 
that they had been used, not capriciously, but to ward 
off the errors of heretics. In this final edition, he accepts 
these terms without reserve, and complains that “it is 
most uncandid to attack the terms which do nothing more 
than explain what the Scriptures declare and sanction.” 
‘““Where names have not been invented rashly, we must 
beware lest we become chargeable with arrogance and 
rashness in rejecting them.”+ His treatment is a repro- 
duction of Augustinian orthodoxy, expressed with much 
caution and rare lucidity, and defended from Scripture 
and the Fathers. 
~ The doctrine of Christ i is given in the context of man’s 


| need of salvation. Y It deeply concerned us, that. He who 


was to be our Mediator should be very God and very man. 
If the necessity be inquired into, it was not what iscommonly 
called simple or absolute, but flowed from the divine 
decree on which the salvation of man depended. . 4 Wie 





_ was best for us, our merciful Father determined.”); He 


needed to be the Son of God, that becoming the Son of man 
He might “so receive what is ours as to transfer to us 
what is His, making that which is His by nature to become 
ours by grace.’ He needed to be very man that He might © 
in man’s stead “ obey the Father,” “‘ present our flesh as the 
price of satisfaction to the just judgement of God, and in 


the same flesh pay the penalty which we had incurred.’’? 


Like Augustine, Calvin does not shrink from asserting the 


1 I, xili. §§ 4, 5. Quotations are from Beveridge’s translation. . 
: II, xii. §§ 1-3, 


vi] REFORMED CHRISTOLOGY 151 


full manhood of Christ. Only one who was truly man as 
well as truly God could fully meet our need. Christ was, 
at once Prophet, Priest and King, and, by this category 
of Christ’s threefold office, Calvin was able to bring into 
one synthesis the whole meaning of Christ’s life and death.? 

Lutheran theology spoke as if the manhood of Christ 
could receive the whole divine Word. To Calvin, with his . 
intense realisation of the difference between the creature 
and the Creator, this seemed impossible. ‘“‘It is sheer 
petulance,” he writes, to say that we hold that “if the 
Word of God became incarnate, it must have been enclosed 
in the narrow tenement of an earthly body.” “For, 
although the boundless essence of the Word was united 
with human nature into one person, we have no idea of any 
enclosing. The Son of God descended miraculously from 
heaven, yet without abandoning heaven; was pleased to 
be conceived miraculously in the Virgin’s womb, to live 
on the earth, and hang upon the Cross, and yet always 
filled the world as from the beginning. a 

In his discussion of previous_heresies,..Calvinstands~ 
firmly — by Chalcedonian orthodoxy. EKutychianism he 
condemned, in that it ‘ confounded the natures,” but >» 
Nestorianism he equally condemned in that it “ divided *~ 
them.?~ Calvin v was accused. unjustly of what_is. is called) 


sme ener eee weeail 


‘‘ Nestorianism.” Yet it is clear that, just as Lutheranism Tee 


represented the Alexandrian Christology, which had, as its | 


peril, Eutychianism ; Calvinism represented the Christology 1 vss Pe 


ace a tel setae or aap 


of Antioch, which had, as its peril, so- “called “‘ Nestorianism.” 
With the school of Antioch, Calvin was able to assert_ 
Christ’ ’struehumanity. His doctrine of Christ’ s person seems 


eh Ee PSRE I 


more credible than Luther’s scholastic theory. It is con- | 
strued from human.need, not from a theory of the Com- 


1 IL, xvi. 

* Li; xiii. §4. The passage is important as expressing the ‘“‘ illud extra Calvin- 
isticum,” which seemed to strict Lutherans to imperil a true Incarnation, and was 
the source of bitter strife between Lutheran and Reformed theologians, 

* II, xiv. § 4, 


152 THE REFORMATION [v1 


munion service, and the Christ he portrays is immeasurably 
nearer to the actual Christ of whom the Gospels speak. ~ 

“So far as formal theory goes, we may well feel that 
Calvin was immensely more successful than was Luther. 
Yet not all was gain. Luther reached by intuition a truth 
to which he and his followers failed to give theological 
expression, for, with a boldness strange in that age, he 
had subordinated the Bible to Christ, and made the test 
of canonicity the extent to which Christ is manifested, and 
in Christ thus revealed he had bidden men see the very 
character of God. Calvin, like later Lutheranism, regarded 
the whole Bible as the very Word of God, and thus confused 
the Christian revelation of God with pre-Christian con- 
ceptions of Him. He calls God Father, and declares that 
‘the first step in piety is to acknowledge that God is a 
Father, to defend, govern and cherish us,’’ and since “‘ the 
majesty of God is too high to be scaled up to by mortals, 
who creep like worms on the earth,’’ he bids us know God 
in Christ, for without Him there is no knowledge of God. 
Yet Calvin fails to give to God a fully Christian meaning. 
His doctrine of predestination brought to him, not com- 
placency, but courage, and a humble sense of vocation, 
a feeling of utter dependence upon the mercy of God. This 
realisation of ‘‘creaturehood,”’ of absolute dependence 
upon God, is, as Otto reminds us, a permanent element 
of true religion,” but religion is a paradox, and the awful 
holy God has been revealed in Christ as the Father, to 
whom not some alone, but all alike, are of infinite worth— 
the Father whose grace is known to us in the character 
of Christ, God’s sovereignty needs to be interpreted in 
terms of God’s Fatherhood, revealed to us in Christ.* 

To Lutheranism, the “ finite was capable of the infinite ”’ ; 

1 Institutes, Il., vi. 4. ‘\A'he Idee phone Hola Chap: atk sae 

* Thus in the exposition of the Decalogue, the God Calvin speaks of is the God of 
some parts of the Old Testament, but not the God of the Gospels, and fatherhood is 
not that fatherhood after which all fatherhood is named (Eph. iii. 15), but a 


fatherhood whose authority is, at God’s command, to be maintained by putting to 
death those who despise their parents, op, cit., IL, viii, 36, 


vi] REFORMED CHRISTOLOGY 153 


the human_nature could receive fully the divine. To 
Calvinism, the “ finite was incapable of the infinite.” ; the 


human nature could not receive fully the divine. Fach. 


position had its truth ; each, as later history was to show, 
its peril. Lutheranism, by confusing the human and the 
divine, could pass easily into a mystic pantheism, or a view 
of Christ which saw in Him not an historic reality but the 
supreme instance of a great principle or idea. Calvinism, 


by emphasising the contrast between the human and the 


divine, could lead some to deny the Incarnation, and to 
‘see in Christ merely the noblest man.! Such perils lay 
in the future. In the meantime, the Reformed Churches 
rendered the immense service of bringing into prominence, 
not Christ’s Godhead only, but. His actual humanity. It 
is significant, as Bruce points out, that, whilst Lutheran 
theologians wrote books On the Divine Majesty of Christ, 
the Reformed wrote On the Verity of Christ’s Human Nature. 
To the Lutheran theologians, the incarnate Christ existed, 
not only in ‘‘ the form of a servant,” but in ‘‘ the form of 
God.’ To the Reformed theologians, incarnation meant 
practically the same thing as humiliation, ‘‘ exinanition.” 
It is true that the divine attributes of omniscience, 
‘omnipotence and omnipresence were not abandoned, but 
‘in the incarnate Christ they were hidden, “like the sun 
veiled by thick clouds.”’? Thus, difficult as their explana- 
tion was, they were able to think of Christ as one who, 
though divine, yet really shared our human lot. 

A recoriettattori of the contradiction between the 
Lutheran and the Reformed Christologies was impossible 
so long as the discussion dealt in terms like finite and 


* Bauke suggests that Calvin’s hostility to Servetus was partly due to the fact 
that he saw in Servetus’ view of Christ a caricature of his own, Die Probleme der 
Theologie Calvins, p. 70. 

* The word used is occultatio. See Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ, pp. 148-72. 
As Bruce puts it, ‘“‘ To their mental view the sun was so obscured by the dense 
cloud of the state of humiliation, that they could regard the Incarnate One as He 
regarded Himself—as the Son of man, the man of sorrows and acquainted with 
grief,” op. cit., p. 172, 


154 THE REFORMATION [v1 


infinite. There is another way—to abandon all such terms, 
and to attempt instead to explore Christ’s revelation of 
God, and, really believing that God is holy love, construe 
the Incarnation from the Church’s understanding of Christ, 
and the new meaning of God and man that Christ has 
brought. That is the way Luther saw, but failed to © 
follow. 


IIT.—SocrntIAnIsm 


We have seen with what violence William of Occam and 
the Nominalists attacked that medieval synthesis of faith 
and reason we studied in Thomas of Aquino. By asserting 
the authority of the Church they sought to restore with 
one hand what they destroyed with the other, but, when 
the Renaissance emancipated men’s minds from the 
domination of the Church, the Nominalistic criticism of 
orthodoxy naturally led those who did not share in the 
Reformers’ rediscovery of the Gospel, to reject, not only 
the medieval synthesis, but that full view of Christ which 
finds expression in the ancient creeds. And so from the 
medieval Church there emerged, not only modern Catho- 
licism and the Reformation Churches, but also the Socinian 
movement. 

Its founder, Faustus Sozzini (A.D. 1539-1604), from whom 
the movement took its name, owed much of his teaching 
to manuscripts bequeathed him by his uncle, Lelio Sozzini 
(A.D 1525-62), an Italian Humanist, who, in his lifetime, 
had prudently concealed his deviations from orthodoxy. 
Faustus Sozzini found it wise to leave Italy, and, after 
a short stay in Switzerland, settled in Poland, where 
Italian influences were strong, and there were already 
anti-Trinitarians enjoying considerable immunity from 
persecution, Through his influence, differences were 
reconciled, and the more extreme views largely abandoned, 
and, under his leadership, Polish Unitarianism acquired 
great importance. Its views can be conveniently studied 


vi] SOCINIANISM 155 


in the Racovian Catechism, which was first published in 
Polish in 4.D. 1605, a year after Faustus Sozzini’s death, 
and was issued in Latin in a.p. 1609, and reissued in an 
enlarged form about a.p. 1659.4 

The Socinian interpretation of Christ is the correlate of 
its conception of religion. ‘‘ The Christian Religion,” as 
the first definition of the Catechism puts it, ‘is the way 
of attaining eternal life, which God has pointed out by 
Jesus Christ; or, in other words, it is the method of 
serving God, which He has Himself delivered by Jesus 
Christ.’’ Christianity is thus primarily a law to be obeyed, 
and the reward of this obedience is eternal life. This law 
is authoritatively set out in the Bible, and is attested by 
the “divine miracles’’ Christ wrought, and by His 
resurrection from the dead. With the Nominalists, God 
is held to be absolute power, and the necessity for satis- 
faction was thus denied. ‘‘ God can, at pleasure, ordain 
laws, and appoint rewards and punishments.’ And God 
is one, not in essence only, but in person. 

The long section on the Person of Christ begins with the 
assertion that He ‘‘ was truly a man.” ‘In that one 
sentence,” as Fock says, “‘ the whole Socinian Christology 
is expressed.”’* Were He other than a man, His resur- 
rection would be no guarantee of ours, and thus we should 
miss the chief end of religion, the certainty of immortality. 
Yet He was not “‘a mere or common man.” He was 
“born of a virgin,’ and distinguished ‘“‘ by the perfect 
holiness of His life,” and ‘“‘ sent by the Father, with supreme 
authority, on an embassy to mankind.” Hecould be called 
“not merely the only-begotten Son of God, but also a God, 
on account of the divine power and authority which He 
displayed even while He was yet mortal; much more may 
He be so denominated now that He has received all power 

1 Our quotations are from Rees’ translation of the A.D. 1680 edition, published 
in A.D. 1818. The Catechism gets its name from the town of Racow, which was the 


headquarters of the movement. 
2 Sect. III. 1. * Socinianismus, p. 510. 


156 THE REFORMATION [v1 


in heaven and earth, and that all things, God alone excepted, 
shave been put under His feet.”” Though thus divine, there 
was in Him no divine nature, or substance, except in the 
sense that the Holy Spirit, the power of God, was united 
‘by an indissoluble bond to His human nature and dis- 
played in Him the wonderful effects of its extraordinary 
presence.”’ His pre-existence is strongly denied, and all 
passages in the New Testament which seem to speak of it 
are explained away, sometimes by violent exegesis. Yet, 
so high is the honour given to Christ, that, following 
Faustus Sozzini, the Catechism teaches that He is to be 
adored and worshipped, and prayers offered to Him as 
“* a second cause of salvation.’’? 

Socinianism was a useful protest against the excessive 
dogmatism of Protestant theology, and much of its 
criticism of orthodoxy was relevant and incisive. But 
although it complained of the illogicality of its opponents, 
it was itself an illogical compromise, meeting many of the 
needs of Christian devotion through inconsistency. Its 
chief lack, however, was not in coherency, but in religion. 
It spoke of what God demanded, and Christ taught. It 
sought to substitute ethics for metaphysics, and, with fine 
ethical rigour, insisted on obedience to the will of God 
revealed in Christ. But it too construed Christianity too 
much in terms of teaching, and lacked that spiritual 
experience, which, in however blundering a fashion, 
Protestant theologians did try to express. We miss in 
Socinianism that rediscovery of religion which made the 
Reformation—the experience of forgiveness through faith 
which was more than an assent to a doctrine, or obedience 
to a law; which was the glad confidence which comes 

a TV. 1. 

* V.1. The invocation and adoration of Christ was the subject of long and bitter 
controversy between Faustus Sozzini and Davidis, an early leader of the Polish 
Anti-Trinitarians, who, with more consistency, rejected the worship of Christ. 
Full quotations are given in Fock, op. cit., pp. 538-42. In this respect, as Rees the 


Unitarian translator points out, English Unitarianism reverted to Davidis’ position, 
and rejected this subordinate worship, The Racovian Catechism, p. 197. 


vt] DEISM 157 


from self-committal to God revealed in Christ as a God 
of grace. A simpler theology was badly needed, but in 
theology, as in religion, reformation can only come through 
deeper faith; and it was that deeper faith, that fuller 
experience of the Gospel, that the Socinians lacked.! 


IV.—Drism 


That reformation of theology was long in coming. 
Against the massive system of Catholic orthodoxy, Pro- 
testant theologians opposed systems as massive and as 
scholastic, whilst ‘‘ Revealed Theology ’’ was once more 
made to rest on the “ Natural Theology,’ derived from the 
Aristotelianism which Luther had scorned. The seven- 
teenth century, in which these systems were established, 
was an age of heroic conflict, and of a piety fragrant still 
in the greatest of all Protestant hymns, the hymns which 
sprang from the agony of the Thirty Years War. But, by 
the end of the century men had grown weary of the strife 
of creeds, and, not unnaturally, some held that it would 
be well for the world if the ‘‘ Natural Theology ” was 
retained, and the ‘“‘ Revealed Theology ’’ abandoned, which 
had led, on the Continent, to the bloody strife of Catholics 
and Protestants, and, in England, of Prelatists and 
Puritans. For once England had the honour, if honour 
it be, of originating a new movement, the Deist Movement. 
Its keywords are given in the best known of Deist books : 
Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious, A.D. 1696, and Tindal’s 
Christianity as Old as the Creation or the Gospel a Republica- 
tion of the Law of Nature, a.D 1730.2 It was a system of 

1 It is of interest to notice the comment of Harnack, himself a “ liberal.” 
““ That the Christian religion is faith, that it is a relation between person and person, 
that it lives, not upon commands and hopes, but upon the power of God, and 
apprehends in Jesus Christ the Lord of Heaven and earth as Father—of all this 
Socinianism knew nothing.” Its “ Christian quality mainly lies” in its “ logical 
inconclusiveness,”’ History of Dogma, VII., p. 167. 

2 Deism goes back at least to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whose De Veritate was 


published in 4.p. 1624. As Leland says, ‘‘ His Lordship seems to have been one of 
the first that formed Deism into a system, and asserted the sufficiency, universality, 


158 THE REFORMATION [vr 


extravagant optimism; its religion, the religion of 
“elegant ’”’ society. And many of the orthodox apologists 
found little more in Christ than did their opponents. For 
them, too, Christianity was a matter of “ evidences.”’ 
‘“‘ Enthusiasm ’’ was scorned, and religion interpreted, 
more as information than redemption. From English 
Deism came the great Aufklzrung movement of Germany, 
the movement of Illumination, Emancipation. | 

In such an age, a reformation of Theology was impossible. 
That could only come after a more incisive scepticism, and 
from a deeper religion. Hume in England, and Kant in 
Germany, showed how dubious were the naive assumptions 
of ‘‘ Natural Theology.’”’ In Germany, the Pietists helped 
to relate Christian faith to Christian life, whilst Zinzendorf 
and the Moravians sought to lead men away from the 
intellectualism, both of orthodoxy and of its opponents, that 
they might “‘ meditate on the manhood of Christ ”’ and find 
in Him a “short compendium of Theology”; “to seek 
the Father nowhere save in Christ ’’ and be content, not 
with ‘“‘a Christological cross” (crux christologica), but 
a ‘Christology of the Cross’”’ (Christologia crucis). The 
Moravian theology was too much a theology of ‘‘ wounds 
and blood,” but it did succeed in presenting Christ once 
more as the actual Lover and Lord of men, and it was 
from the Moravians that Wesley rediscovered for England 
the power of the Gospel, so that irreligion was answered 
at last, not by ‘‘ evidences,’’ but by religion. In England, 
the Evangelical Movement had at first little influence on 
theology. In Germany this warm piety was more closely 


and absolute perfection of natural religion, with a view to discard all extraordinary 
Revelation as useless and needless. . . . This universal religion he reduceth to five 
articles, which he frequently mentioneth in all his works. 1. That there is one 
supreme God, 2. That He is chiefly to be worshipped. 3. That piety and virtue 
is the principal part of His worship. 4. That we must repent of our sins, and, if 
we do so, God will pardon them. 5. That there are rewards for good men, and 
punishments for bad men in a future state, or, as he sometimes expresseth it, both 
here.and hereafter,” A View of the Principal Deistical Writers, a.p. 1754, p. 5. 
But only at the end of the seventeenth century did Deism become dominant. 


vt] DEISM 159 


associated with the culture of the age, and it was from 
the Moravians, as we shall see, that. Schleiermacher learnt 
to base all theology on the Church’s experience of Christ. 
At last Luther’s intuition found more appropriate expres- 
sion, and Schleiermacher became the reformer of theology, 
as Luther had been of religion; the founder, as it has 
been well said, not of a school, but of an epoch. 


Vil 
SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS 


Schletermacher. 

WattTs-DunToN, writing of the change in our poetry at 
the end of the eighteenth century, speaks in words which 
have become famous of ‘‘the Renascence of Wonder,” 
‘“‘the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the 
phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse 
to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and 
wonder.” It is this Renascence of Wonder that Schleier- 
macher reintroduced into Christianity. Born in a.p. 1768, 
his active life coincided with the momentous years which 
followed the French Revolution, and in him are expressed 
the great spiritual forces of that turbulent and creative 
age.} 

It is impossible to understand Schleiermacher’s theology 
without some knowledge of his life. His father was a 
military chaplain of the Reformed Confession, who, like 
so many of that time, had for long preached a formal 
orthodoxy while yet a Rationalist at heart. Moravian 
influences led to his conversion, and it was to a Moravian 
school that the son was sent when fifteen years of age. 
There the lad imbibed the intense and fervid Moravian 
piety, and, on leaving school, entered a Moravian Seminary 
to train for the ministry. The teachers of the Seminary, 
in their anxiety to save their students from the Rationalism 
of the age, suppressed discussion, and tried to keep from 
them all “‘dangerous”’ books. Naturally the keener of 

1 He died in 4.D. 1834, 
160 


vit] SCHLEIERMACHER 161 


them were attracted by what was forbidden, and Schleier- 
macher soon found that he could no longer accept the 
Moravian theology, with its emphasis on Christ’s sub- 
stitutionary death. He left the Seminary, and went to 
Halle, which was then a centre of Rationalist teaching. 
Here he studied Plato, whose works he afterwards trans- 
lated, and came under the influence of the writings of 
Spinoza and Kant. In a.p. 1790 he was made a licentiate 
of the Reformed Church, and, after four years as tutor in 
a nobleman’s house, came to Berlin, where he enjoyed the 
friendship of the literary leaders there of the Romantic 
Movement. 

Romanticist as Schleiermacher at this time was, he felt 
painfully the indifference to religion of many of his Roman- 
ticist friends, and sought to supply this lack in a book 
published anonymously in a.p. 1799, On Religion : Speeches 
to its Cultured Despisers. It is a book very difficult to 
describe in brief, for in it are to be traced, whether by 
attraction or repulsion, most of the forces of that rich and 
confused age. 

Schleiermacher protests against the tendency to reduce 
religion to a system of doctrine, or a code of moral precepts. 
‘ Belief must be something different from a mixture of 
opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one 
life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct, craving for 
a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.”! Religion has 
a sphere of its own. It is the sense of the infinite, and so 
is unconcerned with the strife of schools. ‘‘Seers of the 
Infinite have ever been quiet souls. They abide alone with 
themselves and the Infinite, or, if they do look around 
them, grudge to no one who understands the mighty word 
his own peculiar way.’’? Nor is true religion confined to 
Christianity. The positive religions have all their truth. 
Christianity is the highest of all positive religions, but as 
yet Schleiermacher will not speak of its finality. 

1 Reden I, Oman’s translation, p. 31. 2 Op. cit., p. 55. 
L 


162 SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS {vti 


Christ is ‘‘ the author of the noblest that there has yet 
been in religion.”” His divine element was not “ the purity 
of His moral teaching,” nor ‘“‘the individuality of His 
character, the close union of high power with touching 
gentleness.’’ ‘‘ All these things are merely human.” ‘The 
truly divine element is the glorious clearness to which the 
great idea He came to exhibit attained in His soul. This 
idea was, that all that is finite requires a higher mediation 
to be in accord with the Deity, and that for man under the 
power of the finite and particular, and too ready to imagine 
the divine itself in this form, salvation is only to be found 
in redemption.” ‘‘ What mediates must not again require 
mediation, and cannot be truly finite. It must belong to 
both sides, participating in the Divine Essence in the same 
way and in the same sense in which it participates in human 
nature. But what did He see around Him that was not 
finite and in need of mediation, and where was aught that 
could mediate but Himself ? ‘ No man knoweth the Father 
but the Son, and he to whom the Son shall reveal Him.’ 
This consciousness of the singularity of His knowledge of 
God and of His existence in God, of the original way in 
which this knowledge was in Him, and of the power thereof 
to communicate itself and awake religion, was at once the 
consciousness of His office as mediator and of His divinity.” 
‘With this faith in Himself, who can wonder at His 
assurance that He was not only a mediator for many, but 
would leave behind a great school which would derive 
their religion from Him ?”’} 

Yet Schleiermacher, at this stage, denied that Christ 
was the sole mediator. ‘‘ He never maintained He was 
the only mediator, the only one in whom His idea actualised 
itself.”"* ‘‘ He never made His school equivalent to His 
religion, as if His idea were to be accepted on account of 

1 Reden V. From Oman, op. cit., pp. 246-8. 

* In the 2nd edit. of a.p, 1806, Schleiermacher tones down this assertion by 


adding here, “‘ All who attach themselves to Him, and form His Church, should 
also be mediators with Him and through Him.” 


vit] SCHLEIERMACHER | 163 


His person, and not His person on account of His idea. Nay, 
He could even suffer His mediatorship to be undecided, 
if only the spirit, the principle from which His religion 
developed in Himself and others were not blasphemed. 
His disciples also were far from confusing this school with 
His religion. Pupils of the Baptist still only very im- 
perfectly initiated into the nature of Christianity, were, 
without anything further, regarded and treated by the 
apostles as Christians, and reckoned genuine members of 
the community. And it should be so still. Everyone who, 
in his religion, sets out from the same cardinal point, 
whether his religion originates from himself or from another, 
is, without respect of school, a Christian.’’} 

So Schleiermacher wrote in the first edition of his Speeches, 
leaving without clear answer the question, Was Christ just 
the highest of all mediators, or was there in Him final 
worth ? Later he answered this question from a fuller 
Christian faith. In the second edition of his Speeches, 
published in a.p. 1806, he adds to the passage just quoted 
these words: “It will naturally follow that when Christ 
with His whole efficacy is shown him, he must acknowledge 
Him, who has become historically the centre of all media- 
tion, the true Founder of redemption and reconciliation.”’ 
And in the ‘“‘ Explanations ” appended to his third edition 
of a.D. 1821, Schleiermacher sought still more explicitly to 
correct the defect of his first statement. 

The book, in its first form, is a monument of Roman- 
ticism ; the appeal of a Romanticist to Romanticists, 
written in the first glow of the French Revolution, when 
“to be young was very heaven.” His appeal did not lack 
success.” It would be easy to point out its defects. It is 
obviously inadequate to classic Christian faith. Addressed 
to the ‘“‘ cultured,” it had little Gospel for those engaged 


1 Op. cit., p. 248. 
2 To this book the great Neander largely owed his conversion from Judaism to 
Christianity. 


164 SCHLETERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [viI 


in life’s ordinary tasks. Its conception, both of God and 
of redemption, was too much influenced by the esthetic 
rationalism of the Romantic movement. These defects 
Schleiermacher was himself later partly to correct. But 
the book marked a new era in the understanding both of 
religion and of Christianity. Religion is given a distinctive 
place. It has a value in itself, apart from its service to 
correct opinions or good morals. Christianity is construed 
in the context of religion, and the historical religions ; its 
truth, not proved by “‘ evidences,” but manifested in that 
corporate Christian experience of redemption, which has 
in Christ its source. 

Schleiermacher was absent from Berlin from 4.p. 1802-7. 
When he returned, he had largely freed himself from the 
excesses of Romanticism, and had gained, not from thought 
and study only, but from sorrow and disappointment, a 
profounder understanding of Christianity. He became at 
Berlin not only Professor of Theology in the new university, 
but a great and influential preacher, whose sermons reveal, 
better than his more formal works, his fresh and living 
faith. In a.p, 1821 appeared his vast treatise on The 
Christian Faith, in which his deepened view of Christianity 
found consummate expression. 

Christian theology, as Schleiermacher understands it, 
pertains alone to the Christian Church, and has for its task 
the presentation in systematic form of the Church’s 
corporate experience of redemption. The distinctiveness 
of Christianity finds now adequate expression. Not only 
is ‘Christianity essentially distinguished from other 
religions by the fact that everything in it is related to the 
redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth,’ but 
Jesus has a place in the life of His followers quite unlike 


1 The full title of the book is The Christian Faith, systematically presented 
according to the Fundamental Principles of the Evangelical Church. By the 
Evangelical Church, Schleiermacher meant, neither the Lutheran nor the Re- 
formed alone, but the union of the two which had been effected in Prussia in 
4.D. 1817, 


vit] SCHLEIERMACHER 165 


that which the other founders of monotheistic religions 
claimed. Judaism and Muhammadanism have no necessary 
connection with their founders. The Jewish law might 
have come through someone else, and Muhammad’s revela- 
tion might have been given through some other prophet. 
But the Christian consciousness of redemption is essentially.” 
connected with Christ, who is its source, so that, to the 
Christian, Christ appears as the sole and universal Redeemer, 
Himself requiring no redemption. 

Those who share in the devout consciousness of the 
Christian Church find that Christ makes upon them the 
same impression that in His lifetime He made upon His 
contemporaries. Thus Christian faith does not depend 
upon miracles, prophecies, or other “evidences.” It is an 
inner certainty, which arises from that growing conscious- 
ness of redemption which has its origin in the total impress 
of Christ upon the soul.? 

It is this piety, thus dependent upon Christ, which it is 
the task of Christian theology to express in systematic 
form. So the formulations of theology should not be 
inspired by scientific interests only ; they are part of the 
Church’s proclamation of Christ, for they describe the 
certainty of blessedness through Him.* 

As Christian theology is thus the scientific statement 
of corporate Christian experience, there cannot, with our 
present divisions, be a theology which should be authorita- 
tive for all sections of the Church. All that a Christian 
theologian can attempt is to present the doctrines of a 
particular Church at a particular time.* Theology is not 
an individual pursuit. The Christian consciousness of 
redemption has to be developed in a community, and it is 
the task of theology to determine what is wholesome, and 


1 $11. This account of Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith is based on the 2nd 
German edition of 1831, as reprinted in the four volume Gotha edition of 1889, 
In the condensed paraphrases given, I have borrowed some phrases from Baillie’s 
translation of the paragraph-headings and from the epitome given by Cross, 
The Theology of ReAiaeprinneser, pp. 117-293. 

2 §14, 2 §§ 15, 16. “§ 19. 


166 SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [vit 


what morbid, in the consciousness of his Church.t Every 
formulation of Christian doctrine should be confessionally 
true, i.e. expressive of the Christian consciousness of some 
given Christian communion, scripturally true, as rightly 
expressing New Testament religion, and scientifically true, 
as agreeing with other propositions already recognised.? 

Thus, Christian theology, as Schleiermacher conceives 
it, has no use for Natural theology, with its speculations 
apart from Christ, however true these speculations may be. 
And in regard to Christ Himself, Christian theology is only 
concerned with doctrines, which are related to His redeem- 
ing causality, and thus can be traced back to the original 
impression which He made upon His disciples.* 

Having thus, in his introduction, described the nature 
and scope of Christian theology, Schleiermacher proceeds 
to its systematic exposition. In the first part of his work 
he expounds the unfolding of the religious self-consciousness 
in its distinctively Christian form, and then proceeds to deal 
with the antithesis that self-consciousness reveals, the 
antithesis of the sense of sin, and of the realisation of divine 
grace. It is in connection with the second part of this 
antithesis that he discusses the doctrine of the Person and 
Work of Christ.4 

Throughout Schleiermacher’s exposition, the Person of 
| Christ is interpreted through our experience of redemption 
through Him. His Person and Work are inseparable for 
Christian experience. It is only for systematic convenience 
that they are dealt with successively. The Christian 


1 §22. Schleiermacher goes on to point out that there are two natural sources of 
error: (1) Human nature may be so regarded that the need for redemption is 
obscured, so that we have the Manichean heresy, if the power of evil is exaggerated, 
and the Pelagian, if it is underestimated ; or (2) the Redeemer may be so inter- 
preted that the redemption is incomplete. We have then the docetic heresy if 
the difference between Christ and us is over-emphasised, and the Nazarean or 
Hee heresy if the difference between Christ and us is ignored. 

* § 27. 

* §29. Thus Schleiermacher would exclude from Christian theology such a 
doctrine as Christ’s pre-existence. 

« §§ 86-105, Gotha edition, Vol. ITI, pp. 1-184. 5 § 92. 


Vit] SCHLETERMACHER 167 


realisation of blessedness is possible only through living 
fellowship with the Redeemer. It is through this we know 
the value and meaning of Christ. ‘‘ As the spontaneity 
of the new life is original in the Redeemer, and proceeds 
from Him alone, He must, as an historical individual, be 
at the same time ideal, i.e. the ideal must in Him become 
completely historical, and each historical moment of His 
life must have likewise borne within itself the ideal.’’} 
Under this paragraph-heading, Schleiermacher goes on to 
show that the inherent claim of Christianity to be universal 
and final has, as its presupposition, a perfect Redeemer. 
We know the worth of the Redeemer through His effect 
in the corporate Christian life which springs from Him. 
Christian experience shows that Christ was not a pattern 
or example (Vorbild) only ; He was an archetype (Urbild). 
Were He merely an example, there would have arisen in 
the Church at some time the hope that some at least of 
its noblest members would surpass Him. That hope has 
not arisen, and could not arise without destroying the 
very nature of Christian faith. Thus the sense of Christ’s 
archetypal perfection was not due to the hyperbole of the 
early Church. It is integral to the Christian experience 
of redemption to believe that Christ existed in an archetypal 
(urbildlich) form. This involves that Christ’s perfect 
communion with God did not arise from the general simple 
life of His time. It can be explained in only one way. 
The appearance of Christ in history was supernatural; due 
to the special creative act of God. He appeared in history ; 
His physical and mental equipment was conditioned by 
His age and land. He could not otherwise have been 
an historical figure. Yet throughout all His life, His 
consciousness of God controlled all His energies, so that 
there was in Him no sin, no moral conflict, no uncertainty. 

Christ was thus like us, and yet unlike. His sinlessness 
did not destroy His identity with humanity, for sin does 


i 93. 


168 SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [VII 


not belong to man’s essence, as is shown by man’s sense 
that sin is guilt. Like us in nature, Christ is yet “ dis- 
tinguished from us all by the constant strength of His 
God-consciousness, which was the veritable existence of 
God in Him.’’? 

Schleiermacher then proceeds to criticise, from this 
standpoint, the traditional statements of the creeds. The 
product of ancient conflicts, these formule are inadequate, 
and need restatement.2 Thus the formula, ‘‘In Jesus 
Christ the divine and human natures were united in one 
person’ was meant to express the permanent truth that 
God existed in Christ, and yet Christ is our brother, of one 
nature with us, so that our relation to Christ is, at once, 
one of utter veneration and of brotherly kinship. But the 
terms used have lost their value. The term “divine 
nature ’’ sprang from a pagan philosophy, and is ill-adapted 
to express the existence in Christ of the divine. The word 
‘person’ generally denotes a life-unity, but this unity 
is incompatible with the assertion of two natures which, as 
later Greek thought recognised, involved the predication 
to Christ of two wills. Nor does the use of the word 
“person”? in this formula harmonise with the creedal 
statement of the doctrine of the Trinity, where the word 
is used in another sense, and, for the unity of ‘“ person,” 
is substituted the unity of “‘essence.” The formula thus 
leads to contradictory statements, and is of little service 
to the modern Church. The truth it seeks to express is 
better formulated in the explanation already given, that | 
the Redeemer is like all men in that He possessed the same 
human nature ; He is distinguished from them in that the 
God-consciousness, which in us is weak and clouded, was 
in Him at all times entirely clear and determinative. The 
human was in Him the organ for the reception and presenta- 
tion of the divine, so that, as Paul puts it, ‘‘ God was in 
Christ,’’ or, as John expresses it, “‘ The Word became flesh.’’? 

1 § 94, 2 § 95, > § 96, 


vit} SCHLEIERMACHER 169 


The explanation traditionally given of the two-nature 
doctrine, that the divine nature took up the human into 
the unity of the person, seemed to Schleiermacher objection- 
able. Not only is the term “divine nature’ inappropriate, 
but the formula leads to contradiction in that it makes 
the personality of Christ quite independent of the personality 
of the second person of the Trinity with which it is supposed 
to be identical. Worse still, the human nature can only 
become a ‘‘ person ”’ in the same sense in which the word 
“person ’’ is used in the doctrine of the Trinity, so that 
we are left with the dilemma of a tritheistic conception of 
God, or a docetic interpretation of Christ. Nor do the 
two explanations traditionally given of this union help: 
the impersonality of Christ’s human nature, and His 
supernatural birth. The first makes the human in Christ 
less real for Him than for us. The second involves Christian 
faith in the uncertainty of the Gospel records, and raises 
scientific problems, which are outside the sphere of theology. 
Nor is the doctrine of Christ’s supernatural birth sufficient 
in itself to secure that Christ was free from “ original ” 
sin, whilst the traditional assertion that Mary was per: 
petually a virgin is without foundation in the New Testa- 
ment, and is connected with ascetic ideals. The permanent 
truth for which the doctrine stands is the absolute sinless- 
ness of Christ, and the impossibility that He should have 
appeared in history without the special creative act of God. 
This supernatural origin of Christ Schleiermacher reaffirms, 
without pronouncing on the Virgin birth.1 Christ was 
‘absolutely distinguished from all other men through His 
essential sinlessness and His absolute perfection.” His 
sinlessness was essential, in that it was grounded in the 
very character of His personality, the union in Him of the 
human and the divine.? 


Thus to Schleiermacher the doctrine of Christ is to be’ 


derived from His redeeming activity, and this activity is 
1 $97, 2 $98, 


r 


170 SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [VII 


to be traced not to isolated acts,4 nor even to such great 
historic events as His resurrection and ascension,” but to 
the total impress of His person. And in Christ is revealed, 
not so much one person of the Trinity, as the Godhead.? 


It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of 
Schleiermacher’s work. This book, as Seeberg says, 
“taught the nineteenth century its theology.’* Our very 
indebtedness to it makes it easy for us to miss its significance. 
By it, the old controversy between Rationalists and 
Supernaturalists was superseded. Rationalists had pro- 
tested against the demand for obedience to external 
authority ; Supernaturalists had insisted that Christianity 
was inexplicable, except by God’s creative act. Schleier- 
macher united the truths for which each party stood, and 
succeeded, where both had failed, in delivering theology 
from intellectualism, by interpreting theology, not as 
a series of dogmatic propositions to be accepted on the 
authority of the Bible or the Church, but as the developing 
expression of a redemption which is essentially connected 
with the person of the Redeemer. Christ is final. Theologies 
are local and transitory. The Christian experience is prior 
to the intellectual interpretation of it. 

Here, at last, we have a theology congruous with Luther’s 
grand intuition, a theology whose watchword might well 
be these words of Luther from the preface to his great 
commentary on Galatians, ‘‘ In my heart there reigns that 
one article, faith in Christ, from whom, through whom 

Thus, in the discussion on miracles, in the section on the Work of Christ which 
deals with Christ’s prophetic office, Schleiermacher teaches that the miracles were 
of importance for Christ’s contemporaries as manifestations of His power to meet 
human need. Our concern is not with them, but with the supreme miracle of 
redemption which has in Him its source, anid the perfection of the Kingdom as 
its goal, § 103. 2 § 99, 

* The discussion of the Trinity comes at the end of the treatise (§ 170- 2). 
Schleiermacher regards the traditional formula as inadequate, and requiring 


restatement. 
4 Die Kirche Deutschlands im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, p. 84. 


vit} SCHLETERMACHER 171 


and to whom all my theological meditations, night and 
day, flow and reflow.”’ To Schleiermacher, as to the young 
Melancthon, ‘‘to know Christ’? meant ‘‘to know His 
benefits, not as the Schoolmen teach to contemplate His 
natures, and the modes of His incarnation.’’! 
Schleiermacher was a pioneer, and, like most pioneers, 
he failed to explore fully the new country he had discovered. 
He helped to make theology Christocentric, but his own 
theology was not Christocentric enough. Though he sought 
to free theology from its servitude to philosophy, he was 
yet in bondage to a preconceived philosophy of religion.? 
In reaction from the undue “ objectivity’ of the older 
theology, he was too exclusively subjective, and substituted 
for the given the experienced. But even here he looked 
beyond his own failure. ‘‘ There is only one source,” he 
writes, ‘‘ from which all Christian doctrine is to be derived, 
namely, the self-manifestation of Christ, and only one 
way to derive it, as the teaching, with more or less com- 
pleteness, springs from the devout consciousness and its 
self-expression.” Here the antithesis between objective 
and subjective is reconciled. Christian theology is the 
expression, not of Christian experience alone, but of the 
self-manifestation of Christ as appropriated by Christian 
experience. This reconciliation Schleiermacher did not 
achieve. He based his theology, not on the Christ of the 
Gospels, as interpreted by corporate Christian experience, 
but on corporate Christian experience, from which he 
deduced the archetypal Christ. He was right when he 
claimed that God’s grace is known only through man’s 
faith, but man’s faith can never be the measure of God’s 
grace. The archetypal Christ of whom he speaks is a Christ 
without moral conflict ; He is not the Jesus of history whose 
inner struggle the Gospels do not conceal. More success- 
1 See earlier, p. 143. 
_ * For the influence of Spinoza on Schleiermacher, see Pfleiderer, Development of 


Theology, pp. 108-13. 
3 Zusaiz to § 19 


172 SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [VII 


fully than his contemporaries, Schleiermacher sought to 
connect Christianity with history, yet he too failed to give 
to the historic Christ His prime importance. To Schleier- 
macher, the experience of redemption was inseparable from 
the Redeemer, but his attempt to deduce the archetypal 
Christ from the Christian consciousness, did not sufficiently 
safeguard Christian thought against the substitution for 
the historic Christ of the Christ idea. 

Christian theology can best be tested by the measure 
in which it expresses Christ’s revelation of God, of which 
all Christian theology should be the correlate. Here, most 
conspicuously, Schleiermacher failed to express his Christo- 
centric principle, and his treatment oscillates between the 
esthetic pantheism of his earlier Romanticism and the 
fuller Christian faith of his maturer years. Schleiermacher 
realised his own failure, and himself pointed to a better 
way. Ina letter written in 1829, he admits that a better 
approach would be to deal with the Father first as revealed 
in Christ, so that the first assertion about God would be 
this, that through Christ He had renewed humanity, and 
founded the Kingdom. Schleiermacher felt he was unable 
himself thus to reconstruct his system, and looked forward 
to the time when someone else should appear who would 
apply this principle to theology with a success which he 
himself had lacked.! 

If Schleiermacher failed in part to discover the God 
revealed in Christ, he showed the way. He brought 
theology back to Christ. He taught men to dwell, less on 
isolated incidents of Christ’s life, than on that total impress 
of His personality by which faith is created. He showed 
how to construct theology, not from the presuppositions 
of an alien philosophy, but from the implicates of the 


* Second Sendschreiben to Dr. Liicke (prefaced to the Gotha edition of Die 
Christliche Glaube, pp. 25-68). Schleiermacher gives two reasons why he did not 
thus reconstruct his system: (1) the fear that, as this method would involve that 
the first divine attributes dealt with would be God’s wisdom and love, all later 
would seem an anticlimax; (2) his feeling that he was incapable of carrying out 
this principle, pp. 29-31. 


vit] SCHLEIERMACHER 173 


Christian redemption; to distinguish between the im- 
mediate utterances of the Christian consciousness, and the 
dogmas which embody that experience in categories which 
for us have lost their meaning. We may learn from him 
to approach the doctrine of Christ’s person, not from 
theories of the Trinity, or of the pre-existent life of Christ, 
but from the concrete facts of the historic Christ, and the 
redemption which has in Him its source. Yet it seems 
scarcely possible to stop where he stopped, and refuse, as 
he refused, to face the problem of the relation of Christ 
to the eternal life of God. If his answer was incomplete, 
his new method brought to theology fresh life and meaning. 
He helped to save the Church from vain disputes, and to 
lead theology, back from all lesser tasks, to the supreme 
task of seeking to understand the person and work of 
Christ, and of interpreting through these both God and man. 


Schleiermacher founded no school,! and his teaching 
was only one of the creative forces of the early nineteenth 
century. The old rationalism was moribund. Instead, 
there was the higher intellectualism of Hegel, for whom 
the only reality was thought, and religion of value primarily 
as a popular and pictorial presentation of truths which 
philosophy alone could accurately express.2 Later, 


1 Of the “‘ Friends of Schleiermacher,”’ those nearest to him in spirit and in- 
tention, it must suffice to mention: (1) Ullmann, whose classic discussion on 
The Sinlessness of Jesus, first published as a magazine article in a.D. 1828, was later 
expanded into an elaborate book (EK. T., a.p. 1858, from 6th German edition) ; 
Ullmann continues Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the sinlessness of Jesus as the 
supreme and certain miracle of His life, a sinlessness which was yet expressed as a 
natural human development, and makes of this central fact the prime apologetic 
for Christianity ; (2) C. I. Nitzsch, who in his System of Christian Doctrine (K. T., 
1849, from 5th German edition) brought Schleiermacher’s teaching into closer 
connexion with ecclesiastical tradition, and passed from a ‘Trinity of revelation to 
an actual Trinity of essence. 

2 As Giinther says: ‘“‘ The question whether Hegel’s valuation of dogma means 
its substantiation or its dissolution has been discussed with extraordinary acuteness. 
But the question is really twofold. We have not only to ask, Is Hegel orthodox ? 
but, Who is the orthodox exegete of Hegel ?”’ Die Lehre von der Person Christi, 
p. 108. 


174 SCHLETERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [vII 


Hegelianism was to prove the dissolvent, not of orthodoxy 
alone, but of Christianity ; but at first, by its emphasis 
on the value of dogma, it lent support to those, who in 
their horror of the after-excesses of the Revolution, hated 
liberalism, whether in Church or State, and sought the 
repristination, not of the ancient creeds alone, but of the 
elaborate orthodoxy of Lutheran scholasticism. Of these 
it is unnecessary to speak. Seventeenth-century theology 
is best studied in seventeenth-century theologians. Two 
movements belonging to this period require mention, as 
from them there came fresh and significant contributions 
to Christology : (1) The Neo-Lutheranism of the Erlangen 
school, which, owing to Schleiermacher its emphasis on 
Christian experience, sought to relate to that experience 
a far larger measure of Lutheran orthodoxy, and (2) the 
Mediating School which, accepting the union of the 
Lutheran and Reformed Churches, sought to mediate 
between the ancient faith and modern thought, and, to 
reinterpret Christianity to an age which had learnt from 
Hegel to be interested in speculation. Of these schools we 
may take as representatives Thomasius- (A.D. 1802-75), 
who asserted with new thoroughness the self-emptying 
(kenosis)! of Christ, and Dorner (A.D. 1809-84), who devoted 
the best energies of his long life to the speculative re- 
interpretation of the doctrine of Christ. 


Thomasius. 


How is it possible to assert with Christian orthodoxy 
the pre-existence of Christ and, at the same time, His truly 
human life ? To this the Church had given no clear answer. 
Kither, with Alexandrian and later Lutheran theology, the 
unity of. the incarnate person was maintained, and the 
reality of His human nature obscured, or, with Antiochene 

1 Tt is the word used, in its verbal form, by Paul in Phil. ii. 7 éavrdv éxévwoev 


where the A.V. translates ‘‘ made himself of no reputation” and the R.V., with 
literal accuracy, ‘‘ emptied himself.” 


vit] THOMASIUS 175 


and Calvinist theology, the reality of His human nature 
was maintained, but the unity of His person imperilled. 
Thomasius, as a Lutheran theologian, was conscious that 
Lutheran orthodoxy had peculiarly failed to preserve 
Christ’s genuine humanity, and had sacrified the doctrine 
of the “state of humiliation’ to the doctrine that the 
human nature of Christ shared in the “ majesty ” of the 
Divine. The word “ kenosis’? was not new in theology. 
As we have seen, the Giessen theologians spoke of a 
“ kenosis”’ in Christ’s use of His divine attributes, but 
a “‘kenosts of use”’ is not a real self-emptying. What is » 
new in his kenotic theory is the assertion that the incarna- 
tion is itself a kenosis,1 due to the gracious act of the Son 
of God, who, in order to become, for our sakes, man, 
emptied itself of attributes incompatible with our manhood, 
that so He might exchange the “‘ form of God ” for “ the 
form of a servant.” 

It would seem that the pioneer of the modern kenotic 
theory is Zinzendorf, the great Moravian, who in his 
eagerness to proclaim Christ’s divine condescension and 
true humanity, taught that the Redeemer, when He entered 
into time to be conceived in His mother’s womb, left behind 
Him His divine prerogatives and His Godhead itself. But 
in Zinzendorf we have, not so much a theological theory, 
as an expression of that grateful admiration which finds 
like utterance in Charles Wesley’s hymn : 


** Amazing love! How can it be 
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me ?”’ 


** He left His Father’s home above 
(So free, so infinite His grace), 
Emptied Himself of all but love, 
And bled for Adam’s helpless race : 
"Tis mercy all, immense and free, 
For, O my God, it found out me.”’ 


_ * Apollinarius had realised this (see earlier, p. 107), but had failed to work out 
in full the implicates of this discovery. 


176 SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS {vir 


The kenotic theory received its first, and somewhat 
tentative expression, in theology in the writings of 
Sartorius.!_ Going back to Philippians ii. 7, Sartorius sees 
in “‘ the reconciling incarnation of God in Christ the greatest 
proof of the holy love of God,” just because it is “ the 
deepest self-denial of the Supreme, who, as man, humbled 
Himself even to the form of a servant.”2 Sartorius made 
no attempt to explain how this great act of self-renunciation 
had been accomplished. Of this, the first systematic 
explanation is to be found in the writings of Thomasius. 

An outline of Thomasius’ theory was given in some 
articles published by him in a.pD. 1845. The Incarnation 
was the act of the Son of God, who so assumed human 
nature that His nature became ours. This was possible 
only by an act of self-emptying whereby He renounced the 
glory which He had from the beginning with the Father, 
and, although retaining His divine nature, exchanged the 
divine form of existence for the form of a creature. He 
did not cease to be God, but He ceased to exist in the form 
of God, and so emptied Himself that His self-consciousness 
was human, not divine, and, renouncing the relations in 
which He stood as the creator and lord of the world, 
possessed and used His divine Lordship only in so far as 
He possessed and used it asa man. In this way, the unity 
of His incarnate life was secured, and the reality of His 
human nature asserted. Thomasius’ theory aroused great 


1 The first statement of his views was given in A.D. 1832, in the Dorpat Beitrage 
for that year. To it Thomasius expresses his indebtedness (Christi Person und 
Werk, IL, p. 483). His views receive fuller expression in his Doctrine of the Divine 
Love, A.D. 1840-56, E.T., a.p. 1884, 

* The Doctrine of Divine Love, p. 140. Sartorius adds, ‘ It was not merely some 
kind of docetic concealment (xpvyis) of the divine glory which took place therein, 
but an actual deprivation (xéywois) not indeed of its eternal potentiality, which 
was impossible, but certainly of its infinite actuality in finiteness.” In a note on 
this he remarks, “ It is only in the operibus ad intra that the infinite potentiality of 
the Godhead is in equally infinite actuality ; in the operibus ad extra, on the con- 
trary, where the finite is assumed and determined, a certain voluntary self limita- 
tion is already assumed with it.” 

3 These articles which appeared in the Zeitschrift fiir Protestantismus und 
Kirche, are fully described by Bensow, Die Lehre von der Kenose, pp. 42-52. 


vit] THOMASIUS 177 


interest. It was accepted in part by some, and strongly 
attacked by others. In a series of articles published in 
A.D. 1846, Thomasius expressed himself with more pre- 
cision, and made clear that, in his view, the Logos renounced, 
not His divine existence, but only that divine glory which 
consists, not in the immanent relations of the Godhead, 
but in the relations which are external to the Trinity. 
His views received full expression in the first two volumes 
of his great book, Christ’s Person and Work : A Presentation 
of Evangelical Lutheran Dogmatics from the Central Point 
of Christology,1 the first edition of which appeared in 
A.D. 1853 and 1855. 

The first volume is devoted to an exposition of the 
Presuppositions of Christology, and begins with a discussion 
of the Christian conception of God. God is the absolute 
Personality. He is triune. ‘“‘ We are compelled through 
our actual relationship to God to assert that Father, Son 
and Holy Spirit are, at once, personally distinguished one 
from another, and essentially united one to another.’’? 
From this Trinity of manifestation, Thomasius reaches the 
Trinity of essence. “The objective existence of the 
Trinitarian relationship is the necessary presupposition of 
our minciskin to God, our personal communion with 
Him.’’? “As God thus exists in a Trinity of Persons, there 
can be no will, knowledge or life in Him which is not 
determined in a triune way.’’* So we can claim that there 
are immanent in God, not only the attributes of absolute 
power (or freedom), intelligence and blessedness,> but 
also holiness, truth and love. From the Christian con- 
ception of God, Thomasius passes to the Christian con- 
ception of man as personal like God Himself, but with a 

1 Christi Person und Werk. Darstellung der evangelisch-lutherischen Dogmatik 
me Mittelpunkt der Christologie aus, 

» p. 50. ° 1., p. 56. “L, p. 119. L, p. 45. 

* I., pp. 119, 120. These attributes are immanent in God, inherent in His triune 

life, in contrast to attributes, like omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, 


which are relative to creation, expressing the relations of God to that which is ex- 
ternal to Him. 


M 


178 SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [viz 


personality, not absolute but creaturely, and to the content 
of the eternal will of God to be fulfilled in the incarnation 
of the Word. Thomasius then proceeds from the super- 
temporal to the temporal presuppositions. of Christology, 
the sin of man, and his need of redemption, through which 
the eternal decree of incarnation became a decree of 
reconciliation. 

Having thus discussed these presuppositions, Thomasius 
goes on, in the second volume, to state his doctrine of 
Christ’s person. 

Here again Thomasius begins with the prime fact of 
Christian experience, our communion with God mediated 
by the living Christ, who has reconciled us to God, and 
with whom we are in a personal communion, which is, at 
the same time, communion with God. Such a mediator 
is at one both with God and with us. He is the Godman, 
and every conception of His person is in error which 
imperils either the reality of His Godhead or the truth 
of His humanity.? 

The general possibility of the intimate union of God 
with humanity in the person of Christ rests on the relation 
of God to man already discussed. If the divine and the 
human were mutually opposed to each other, such a union 
would be impossible, but man, as personal, is related to 
God and created for communion with Him. Thus the Son, 
in entering humanity, is not entering a sphere inadequate 
for Him. The nature with which He unites Himself is 
a nature which He Himself created that in it He might 
reveal Himself.? 

To speak of the assumption of human nature is not 
enough. We can only explain the historic person of the 
Godman if we assert the self-limitation of the divine. If, 
in the finite nature He assumed, the eternal Son of God 
continued to abide in the divine mode of being and activity, 
retaining His illimitable world-ruling and world-embracing 


? IL, pp. 8-13. ? IL, pp. 53-5. 


vit] THOMASIUS 179 


powers, there would be no true unity, for the consciousness 
that the Son would have of Himself, and of His universal 
power, would be irreconcilable with that of the historic 
Christ. There would then be a double mode of existence, 
a double life, a double consciousness, for the Word would 
be or have something which, as not experienced in His 
historical manifestation, would not belong to the man 
Jesus, and this, it would seem, must destroy the unity 
of the person, the identity of the “ I.’’4 

If Thomasius thus rejects the Calvinistic theory of the 
double life of the Word, he is no more content with the 
Lutheran doctrine which preserves the unity of the person, 
but does so at too great a cost. If, as Lutheranism had 
taught, the Son of God shared with the human nature 
He assumed the fullness of His divine majesty, the human 
nature would have been stripped of its earthly limitations, 
and no longer homogeneous with our present human life. 
Such a deification of the human nature is incompatible 
with the belief that the human life of Jesus had a gradual 
development, and contradicts the Gospel picture of a 
Christ who endured real suffering and real temptation.? 

True incarnation then means that God became man. 
This involved for the Son of God self-limitation, a self- 
emptying, not of His essential Godhead, but of His divine 
mode of existence, so that He could receive instead a form 
of existence human and creaturely. The assumption of 
our flesh must have meant the self-limitation of the Son 
of God. Here we have the deepest mystery of the self- 
denying love of God, an act of love in which the eternal 
Son of the Father becomes like us, suffering and dying 
to reconcile us to God that so He might make us share 
His majesty.® 

Thomasius claims in this way to have reached the 
conception of a person at once God and man, essentially 
one with the Father, and yet humanly conditioned in His 


1 IL, pp. 128, 129, 2 I1., p. 130. 3 IL, pp. 131, 132. 


1°0 SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [VII 


consciousness and life, with a human nature homogeneous 
with our own. He is the Godman whose personality is 
divine and human. Thus all dualism is excluded. There 
was not a divine and a human consciousness, but one 
divine-human consciousness. ‘Thus the requirements of 
Christology are met. We have true Godhead and true 
manhood, and the unity in Him of the human and the 
divine. Just because of its uniqueness, this divine-human 
person remains for us a mystery for which human speech 
has no adequate expression, and human thought no 
appropriate concept. + 

This mystery Thomasius seeks, if not to explain, yet 
to describe. Here he fell back on the distinction he had 
already indicated between attributes immanent in the 
Godhead and attributes which express the relation of God 
to what is external to Him. The incarnation is not an 
abandonment, but a manifestation, of the immanent 
attributes of power, truth, holiness and love. Yet it is 
at the same time a self-emptying by the Son of God of 
relative attributes, like omnipotence, omnipresence and 
omniscience, in which the immanent attributes find 
expression. Thus the Mediator, when in the form of flesh, 
neither used nor possessed that omnipotence which is the 
manifestation of divine power in its relation to the world. 
The power He had was the moral lordship of truth and 
love. He did not rule the universe, while as man He lived 
on the earth, and suffered, and died. Even His miracles 
are no proof of His omnipotence. They were the works 
His Father did through Him. They pertained to Him 
through His vocation. His deep insight into human 
nature was not omnis¢ience. Nor was He omnipresent, 
but, like ourselves, was bound by the limits of time and 
space.” 

Thomasius, by making the subject of the kenosis the 
pre-existent Son of God, thus sought to reconcile Church 


1 IL, p. 190. 2 IL, pp. 215, 216. 


vit] THOMASIUS 181 


orthodoxy with a genuine belief in the real humanity of 
Christ. Eager as he was that his view should not be 
regarded as an innovation, he had to admit that it was 
only from occasional passages that any support could be 
found for it in the teaching of the early Church.! As we 
have seen, the Council of Nicwa of a.p. 325 expressly 
anathematised those who say that the Son of God was 
“subject to change,”? whilst the definition of the Council 
of Chalcedon of A.p. 451 asserts that the two natures in 
Christ “‘ existed without confusion or change.’ Thomasius 
was a convinced and loyal Lutheran, yet the Formula of 
Concord, the authoritative symbol of Lutheran orthodoxy, 
“rejects and condemns ” any real kenosis as a “ horrible 
and blasphemous interpretation.” * But Thomasius claimed 
that his view was the natural outcome of the inner dialectic 
of Lutheran dogma, for, if Christ’s real humanity was to 
be preserved, in no other way could the intimate union 
of the divine and human natures in Christ be expressed. 
The most incisive criticism of this theory came from 
Dorner, who complained that this theory was a new form 
of Theopaschitism, and impinged on the immutability 
of God. It is by no means clear that ‘‘ Theopaschitism ”’ 
is so impossible a theory as Dorner supposes, for the belief 
that God can suffer seems to be not incompatible with 
a religion which asserts that God is love. To Dorner’s 
assertion of God’s immutability, Thomasius replied that 
that doctrine can be so emphasised as to become a doctrine 
of God’s imperfection, ““ imperilling God’s love, and reducing 
His power to impotence.” “For God there is no law but 
that love which is one with His holiness. A God prevented 
by His immutability from conditioning Himself in love, 
and allowing Himself to be so conditioned as He wills, is 


1 Such passages are to be found in Ignatius, Ireneus, Tertullian, Origen and 
Hilary, and in the “ heretic’ Apollinarius. They are fully discussed by Loofs in his 
article on Kenosis in Hauck-Herzog, Realencyclopddie fiir protestantische T heologie 
und Kirche, X., pp. 246-63. 

? See earlier, p. 100. 3 See earlier, p. 115. 

* Article VIIL, 20. Schaff, Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches, p. 158. 


182 SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [v1I 


not the God of whom the Scriptures speak. Such a God 
could not indeed become man. He would at most be able 
to impart Himself to man ; man He could not become.’ 

The kenotic theory has been much condemned. It 
has to be remembered that the most scornful attacks have 
come from those who deny or ignore Christ’s pre-existence, 
and thus escape the problem which it seeks to solve. For 
those who accept Christ’s pre-existence, the problem of 
the relation of the pre-existent life of Christ to the human 
life of the incarnate Saviour is a problem which still 
remains. And, if an age of speculation should once more 
return, it might well prove that Thomasius’ theory had 
not quite lost its value, and meanwhile we too may with 
him believe that holy love is essential to the divine as 
omnipotence is not.? 


Dorner. 


To-day even those who accept some form of the kenotic 
theory speak with much more reserve than Thomasius did. 
We prefer to pass from the known to the unknown, from 
the historic life of Jesus and His presence in the Church 
to-day, to His pre-existent life of which revelation tells 
us little, and Christian experience can tell us nothing. So 
to-day Thomasius is naturally criticised for his excessive 
speculation. That was not a criticism which could be 


1 From the 2nd edit. of his Christi Person und Werk, I1., pp. 552 ff. 

* Of the modifications the kenotic theory received from those who adopted in 
part Thomasius’ views we have no space to speak. They are fully described in 
Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ, pp. 172-247, and in Beusow, Die Lehre von der 
Kenose, pp. 61-128. The most significant are those of Martensen and Geass. 
Martensen sought to meet the criticism of those who complained that Thomasius’ 
theory dislocated the Trinity, by himself asserting a real but relative kenosis. 
The Logos continued His world functions during the Incarnation, but the Logos, 
as incarnate, was in the form of a servant, so that ‘“‘ we see in Christ not the naked 
God but the fullness of Deity framed in the ring of humanity, not the attributes of 
the divine nature in their unbounded infinitude, but the divine attributes embodied 
in the attributes of human nature,” Christian Dogmatics, E.T., pp. 258-74. Gess, 
abandoning Thomasius’ distinction between the immanent and relative attributes, - 
taught a complete depotentiation of the Logos—a view which to his opponents 
seemed the reductio ad absurdum of the whole theory. 


vit} DORNER 183 


employed by his chief contemporary opponent, Dorner, 
whose own theory of the Person of Christ is a vast synthesis 
of faith, history and philosophy. No writer has brought 
to the exposition of this doctrine a more laborious learning. 
His History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ is still 
the fullest that we have. It is a book inspired by the 
Hegelian optimism which sees in the history of ideas the 
gradual triumph of advancing truth. His own views 
received their fullest systematic form in the System of 
Christian Doctrine, published in a.p. 1879-81, in his 
venerable old age.’ 

Dorner is the supreme representative of the Mediating, 
Theology of the School of Conciliation, which its enemies 
called the School of Compromise. Accepting as God-given. 
the Union of the Lutheran and Reformed Churchés, this 
School sought, not only to reconcile these two Confessions, 
but to mediate between the ancient faith and the culture 
of an age not yet distrustful of speculation. Dorner’s work 
shows at once the strength and weakness of this School. 
It has its breadth of interest and sympathy ; it has too 
its undue complexity, its over-eager straining to reconcile 
in a higher synthesis many and incompatible standpoints. 
His treatment is sadly lacking in simplicity. It is not the 
statement of a Gospel which can be preached. It is a 
theology for intellectual aristocrats, and is unintelligible 
except to those trained in speculation. Of his theory it is 
only possible here to give the central tenet, leaving un- 
expressed its innumerable amplifications and digressions. 

Dorner’s treatment is based on an elaborate speculative 
interpretation of the Trinity, in which, with Augustine and 
the “ Athanasian’ Creed, the unity of God is strongly 
emphasised. The ‘ threefoldness ”’ is not of persons, but 
of “ hypostases,” of modes of being. It is God who is 
personal, and His Personality can only be conceived as it 


1 .T., 5 vols., 1861, 2, from the 2nd German edit, of 4,p. 1856, 
2 K,T., 4 vols., a.p. 1880-2, 


\ 


184 SCHLETERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [vir 


is thought of as triune.! It is in the eternal distinction 
within the Godhead that the possibility of the Incarnation 
lies, for it is through this that God can ‘‘ communicate 
and reveal Himself, whilst He is and remains at the same 
time in Himself.’’? 

Central to Dorner’s construction is his idea of the God- 
manhood of Christ. The Logos, as the revealing principle, 
so united itself with a man that there could finally result 
the perfect God-humanity. The incarnation was thus a 
process, not a momentary act; a process which was 
continuous and augmentative. Christ shared in true 
human growth; and this genuine human development 
was accompanied by the progressive appropriation of the 
human by the divine, and by the fuller receptivity of the 
human for new aspects of the divine Word. In this way, 
Dorner sought to harmonise the fact of the human growth 
of Christ with the doctrine of divine Immutability. In 
his interpretation of the incarnate life, the states of 
humiliation and exaltation are regarded, not as successive, 
but as synchronous. The external humbleness and self- 
humiliation of Christ, which culminated in the Cross, was 
accompanied by an increasing inner transfiguration and 
self-realisation of the God-humanity.* Before Christ’s 
death, the divine-human union was incompletely realised, 
for not yet was “ He raised above the capacity of suffering 
and dying, not even above assaults and temptations, and 
therefore His blessedness was not yet made perfect ”’ and 
“absolute divine majesty and might were as yet wanting 
to Him.’4 ‘The Cross consummated the union of His 
person. His resurrection was a witness to the reality of 
that union between the divine and the human in Him 
which death could not break. His ascension was the 


Cp. “‘ The eternal result of the eternal Self-discrimination of God from Himself, 
together with the equally eternal re-entrance into Himself, is the Organism of the 
absolute divine Personality, so that only he truly thinks the personal God who 
does not deny the triune God, the guarantee of absolute Personality,” System of 
Christian Doctrine, E.T., I., p. 412. 

* Op, cit., IIl., p. 291. * Op. cit., IIL, p. 338,  * Op. cit., IV., pp. 125, 126, 


vit] DORNER ; 185 


absolute exaltation of the God-man above all the limits 
of time and space, so that, in His heavenly session, His 
humanity is perfected to be the free and adequate organ 
of the Word. 

To Dorner, the doctrine of the God-man belonged, not 
only to revelation, and to history. It was the inevitable 
postulate of any truly rational world-view. These theories 
of Thomasius and Dorner belong to a period when there 
was still the happy confidence of uniting the dictates of 
faith and the tenets of philosophy into a vast and unified 
system. Dorner’s History of the Doctrine of the Person 
of Christ, like Thomasius’ great work, aroused much 
interest, but his System of Christian Doctrine had in 
Germany little influence.2 By then a new age had begun, 
and speculative constructions ceased to convince or 
fascinate. Hegelianism, which had supplied the impulse 
to the speculative reinterpretation of orthodoxy, had 
already proved less friend than foe to faith. It had led 
to the substitution for the Person of Christ of the “ Christ- 
idea,’ and to a radical criticism which menaced the 
historical foundations of Christianity. The distaste for 
speculation had been increased by the rapid growth of 
natural science, whose conclusions seemed for the time 
to leave no room for a living religion. The supreme concern 
of theologians was no longer to find an intellectual theory 
which would explain the relation of the divine to the human 
in the incarnate Christ. There were graver and more urgent 


1 Op. cit., IV., pp. 134-9. It is of importance to notice the contrast between the 
theories of Thomasius and Dorner. They represent in the nineteenth century 
the old antithesis between the theories of Alexandria and of Antioch. Each theory 
has its advantage and its peril, Thomasius, emphasising the “ three-ness”’ of the 
Trinity, was able to assert the continuity of the person of the eternal Son of God 
with the person of the incarnate Christ. Dorner complained that this kenotic 
view tended to a conception of God which was tritheistic, and an interpretation 
of the Incarnation which was Apollinarian, a theophany in human form (op. cit., 
Ifl., pp. 264, 265). Dorner, emphasising the unity of the Trinity, himself by his 
theory of the gradual impartation of the Logos, secured the reality of Christ’s 
human growth; but made less clear the continuity of the person of the incarnate 
Christ with the eternal Word. 

* Cp. Seeberg, Die Kirche Deutschlands im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, p. 291. 


186 SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [vII 


questions. Can we know anything of God? Is there in 
Christ a revelation of God undissolved by idealism, and 
safe from the attacks both of criticism and of science ? 
So the brilliant speculations of men like Thomasius and 
Dorner fell into obscurity. It was useless to explain the 
incarnation by elaborate theories, when the very existence 
of Christianity was at issue. Henceforth the dominant 
influence in German theology was Ritschl’s, and Ritschl 
sought to lead the Church away from all speculation to the 
simple and inexpugnable fact of the historic Christ, who, 
whatever be the mystery of His person, has for us the value 
of God, for He has brought to us a revelation of God and 
of God’s purposes, adequate for our religious needs; a 
revelation which is to be interpreted, not by speculation, 
but through our experience of His redemption, and our 
participation in His Kingdom. 


The Contribution of English Theology. 


In the period with which this chapter deals, English 
theologians made few contributions to Christology. English 
theology was still strangely isolated. Not until after 
A.D. 1860 did English theology, as a whole, respond to 
German influences, whilst the fierce outcry against the 
publication about that time of Hssays and Reviews and 
Colenso’s researches into the Pentateuch is a proof of the 
tardiness with which the official teachers of the Church 
faced the facts of Biblical Research. Evangelicals, within 
and without the Established Church, were engrossed in the 
practical problems of piety, and in theology were more 
concerned with the work of Christ than with His person, 
whilst the Tractarians were absorbed in such problems as 
the Doctrine of the Church, Apostolical Succession, and 
the meaning of the Sacraments, and, in their enthusiasm 
for the first few Christian centuries, tended to treat the 
Doctrine of the Incarnation as if it were primarily a 


4 


vit] THE ENGLISH CONTRIBUTION 187 


problem in Patristics, requiring for its solution a catena 
of passages from the ‘‘ Fathers.”’ 

In Germany, theology in the nineteenth century has 
had a history; it has been the result of the interplay of 
schools of thought, which have been closely connected with 
current philosophies. In England, theology has been less 
the work of schools of thought than of individuals, and 
so has lacked the continuity which makes a brief description 
possible. It is significant that in the period with which 
this chapter deals the two most important contributions 
in English to our subject came, not from University 
teachers, but from isolated and lonely thinkers, from 
F. W. Robertson and from McLeod Campbell. And both 
these men were fiercely attacked as traitors to the truth. 

Robertson was a preacher, not a theologian, but he 
succeeded where most contemporary English theologians 
failed, in bringing men back to the historic Christ as the 
Way, the Truth, the Life.1 To Robertson, it seemed of 
little use to affirm Christ’s deity and then to leave it as 
a dogma, unrelated to Christian experience. Instead, he 
so portrayed the words and deeds of Christ as to reveal 
their supreme importance for our understanding both of 
God and man, and for our practical guidance in the 
problems of modern life. Most contemporary English 
theology has perished. His sermons still live, and seem 
as apt for our time as his. 

McLeod Campbell’s great book On the Nature of the 
Atonement seems likewise strangely modern.” His parti- 
cular formulation of the meaning of Christ’s work may need 
restatement, and, in any case, does not concern us here ; 


1 It is of interest to notice the great similarity of Robertson’s teaching to that 
Jater expressed in Hort’s Hulsean lectures, The Way, the Truth and the Life. Both 
writers, as Storr says, show “ the same sense of the organic nature of truth, the same 
appreciation of the conditions necessary for its apprehension, the same conviction 
that all ways of truth meet in Christ,’ Development of English Theology in the 
Nineteenth Century, p. 415. 

* First published in a.p. 1855. Our references are to the 1906 reprint of the 6th 
edit. 


188 SCHLEIERMACHER AND HIS SUCCESSORS [VII 


but the book is extraordinarily successful in understanding 
Christ in a Christian way. 

Orthodoxy had sought to force the Christian revelation 
into the mould of preconceived ideas of God’s character. 
Campbell rejects all such endeavours. His book is “an 
attempt to answer Anselm’s question Cur Deus homo ? 
by the light of the divine fact itself as to which the question 
is put ; instead of seeking an answer . . . in considerations 
exterior to the fact.”! In seeking to interpret the Atone- 
ment “‘in its own light,” he succeeds in interpreting all 
Christianity ‘‘in its own light,” in the light of the un- 
imaginable grace of God in Christ. This is the more 
remarkable, as McLeod Campbell still retained the tradi- 
tional belief in the full authority of every part of the Bible. 
Yet his unfailing insight enabled him to pass by all 
subchristian views, and, beginning with the fact of the 
incarnation, reach the conception of God’s Fatherhood as 
“the ultimate truth of our faith,’ a Fatherhood without 
defect or sentimentality, for it is a Fatherhood interpreted 
through the gift of Christ. 

McLeod Campbell’s book is more than a theological 
treatise. It is a great classic of devotion in which the 
incarnation is brought into intimate relation with faith and 
duty. Christ ‘‘ gives us to know God as our Father, and 
men as our brethren.’ “‘ Christ, as the Lord of our spirits 
and our love, devotes us to God, and devotes us to men, 
in the fellowship of His self-sacrifice.”? ‘‘ If we refuse to 
be in Christ the brothers of men, we cannot be in Christ 
the sons of God.’’? In Christ, our thought of God and man 
are Christianised. And this is the teaching of a man deposed 
from his office for heresy—the heresy of preaching that 
Christ died for all, and not only for the elect. 


1 p. xvii. 2 p. 316. * p. 318. 


VIIl 
RITSCHL AND THE MODERN PERIOD 


Ritschl. 

It is not easy for our generation to appreciate the debt 
it owes to Ritschl.1. His theology was one of reaction 
against the over-intellectualism of orthodoxy and liberalism, 
and the forces against which he reacted are to-day forgotten. 
In England, the first descriptions of his teaching were 
prejudiced and hostile,? and their harsh judgements are 
often repeated by those who have themselves accepted 
many of Ritschl’s distinctive ideas, without realising 
whence they came; whilst in Germany, Ritschlianism has 
so dominated theology that the younger men to-day are 
naturally in revolt against it, and are more conscious of 
Ritschl’s limitations than of the permanent contribution 
he made to Christian thought. 

The son and grandson of theologians, theology was from 
early years the supreme interest of Ritschl’s life. He was 
able to influence his age because he had been so greatly 
influenced by it. Hegelianism had led, not only to attempts 
at the speculative reinterpretation of orthodoxy, but also 
to the anti-Christian polemic of Strauss, and to the subtle 
and destructive criticism of the Tiibingen school, which 
saw in the Gospels, not genuine history, but the deliberate 
product of the strife between Judaising and Paulinising 
Christianity. Ritschl, for a time, was fascinated by Hegelian 


1 a.D, 1822-89. 
2 As e.g. Denney’s Studies in Theology, a.D. 1895 and Orr, The Ritschlian 
Theology, a.D, 1897. 


189 


190 THE MODERN PERIOD [VIII 


speculation, and his first published works were written 
under the influence of Tiibingen criticism. 

Ritschl broke with the Tiibingen school, and did much 
to destroy its influence. The attempt to interpret Chris- 
tianity by Hegelian dialectic had obscured the historic 
Christ, and led many to feel that they could dispense with 
Christ if they retained the Christ-idea. In reaction to all 
this, Ritschl called his generation to abandon all flights 
of speculation, and be content to return to the historic 
Christ and to the revelation of God to be found in Him. 
It was the message his age needed, and there gathered 
around him men who revivified Biblical Scholarship and 
the Study of Christian Doctrine, whilst his work had a wide 
and salutary influence outside the circles of his own 
followers, 

Ritschl’s distinctive approach to Christianity is well 
indicated in the opening paragraph of his short summary 
of Instruction in the Christian Religion.2, Two facts have 
always to be remembered. The Christian religion has its 
origin in a special revelation ; it exists in a special com- 
munity of believers. Its distinctive coriception of God 
must always be considered in connexion with these two 
facts. To ignore either of them means a defective theology. 
Thus, with Schleiermacher, Ritschl gives full place to the 
corporate Christian consciousness of the believing com- 
munity. But he does not begin there. Christianity is 
a religion of revelation, and Ritschl begins with the 
revelation in Christ and interprets this revelation through 
the appropriation of it by the believing community. Thus 
Christian truth is neither objective alone, nor subjective 


2 So in his Theologie und Metaphysik*, p. 18, he writes, ‘‘ The Absolute—how 
queer that sounds. I still faintly remember when I too busied myself with the 
word in the days of my youth when the Hegelian terminology threatened to draw 
me into its vortex. That was long ago.” 

2 This difficult little book was first published in a.p. 1875 (for the use of school- 
boys !). An English translation from the 4th German edit. is given in Swing, The 
Theology of Albrecht Ritschl. 


vit] RITSCHL 191 


alone, and Christian theology has for its subject matter 
something which is at once given and received. 

Inevitably Christianity claims to be the perfect religion, 
for it has received a perfect knowledge of God from Christ, 
who as the Son of God ascribed to Himself a perfect 
knowledge of His Father.! It is with the discussion of this 
claim that Ritschl begins the chapter on the Doctrine of 
the Person and Life-work of Christ in his monumental 
treatise on Justification and Reconciliation.2 ‘‘ The nature 
of Christianity as a universal religion is such that in the 
- Christian view of the world a definite place is assigned to 
its historic founder.”’ All that we possess in Christianity 
is ours only as we recognise in Christ at once the perfect 
revealer of God, and the one who Himself perfectly 
manifested that lordship over the world which He imparts 
to His followers. It is this which “‘ finds expression in the 
single predicate of His Godhead.’’® 

How is this Godhead to be interpreted ? The traditional 
doctrine of the two natures in one person is rejected as 
incongruous with the evangelical conception of salvation. 
It is true that Luther assumed the two nature doctrine, 
but really he ‘“‘ connected the religious estimate of Christ 
as God with the significance which Christ’s work has for 
the Christian community, and with the position thereby 
given to Christ as the head of the Kingdom of God. 
According to Luther, the Godhead of Christ is not exhausted 
by maintaining the existence in Christ of the divine nature ; 
the chief point is that in His exertions as man His Godhead 
is manifest and savingly effective.”’* It is this approach 
to Christ’s Godhead that we find in the famous words of 
Melancthon already quoted, “‘To know ‘Christ is to 
know His benefits ”»—to know what He has done for us.® 


' Instruction in the Christian Religion, § 2. 

* In 3 vols., first published in 4.p. 1870-4 (E.T. of the Ist. edit. of the lst and 
historical volume, A.D. 1872; of the 3rd edit. of the 3rd and systematic volume, 
1900). Our references are to this latter translation. 

’ Justification and Reconciliation, pp. 385-9. 

“ Op. cit., p. 393. ® See earlier, p. 143. 


192 THE MODERN PERIOD [VIII 


It is here that Ritschl introduces his much abused 
doctrine of value-judgements. If, as Luther taught, 
‘‘ Christ by what He has done and suffered for my salvation 
is my Lord, and if, by trusting for my salvation to the 
power of what He has done for me, I honour Him as my 
God, then that is a value-judgement of a direct kind. It 
is not a judgement which belongs to the sphere of dis- 
interested scientific knowledge, like the formula of Chalce- 
don.” The phrase “ value-judgement”’ (Werthurteil) was, 
in many ways, an unhappy one. But, whatever other 
faults Ritschl had, he was at least an honest man. He did 
not mean, as his enemies maintained, that we could assert 
Christ’s Godhead because of its practical usefulness, and 
leave uncertain the question of its reality. What he did 
mean was this, that Christ’s Godhead cannot be proved 
except to those “who have felt His saving influence ” 
upon themselves. ‘‘ We must first be able to prove the 
Godhead that is revealed before we take account of the 
Godhead that is eternal.’’} 

Ritschl thus rejects all attempts to. explain Christ’s 
person by speculations on the nature of God, or of the 
pre-existent Logos. We know Christ only through what 


1 Op. cit., pp. 398, 339. It is not true to say that Ritschl’s theology was based 
on his theory of knowledge. His theory of knowledge was introduced later to 
support his theology. Ritschl was certain that the objects of Christian faith were 
real. The two kinds of knowledge corresponded to two modes of cognition. Later 
Ritschlians have sought to remove the ambiguity of the term. Thus Reischle 
prefers to speak of judgements of faith (Glaubensurteile), or thymetic judgements, 
i.e. personal judgements, judgements of trust (Vertrauensurtetle), Christliche 
Glaubenslehre, pp. 8, 9. So J. Kaftan emphasises that religion has to do with 
existential-judgements but with existential-judgements based on faith. “ Faith, 
though rooted in the personal life, is true knowledge,” Dogmatik’, pp. 37, 38. The 
problem is discussed anew in the most recent Dogmatik of the Ritschlian school, 
Stephan’s Glaubenslehre (A.D. 1921). Stephan reminds us that the Sermon on the 
Mount, Paul and John, are at one in emphasising that true knowledge of the super- 
sensual can only be reached in a religious way, and in response to Revelation. 
Stephan prefers Reischle’s term, “ judgement of trust,’ to Ritschl’s “* judgement of 
value,’ for it makes clear that religious knowledge has its analogies in other 
spheres of life. Our relationships to men are based also on “‘ judgements of trust.” 
Such knowledge may be alogical, non-rational, and intuitive, but it has no less 
certainty than rational logical knowledge (Glaubenslehre, pp. 67, 68). For a full 
and lucid discussion of the whole problem, sce Garvie, T'he Christian Certainty amid 
the Modern Perplexity, pp. 230-78. 


Vit} RITSCHL 193 


He has done for us. “The theological solution of the 
problem of Christ’s divinity must be based upon an analysis 
of what He has done for the salvation of mankind in the 
form of His community.” 


In his analysis of the work of Christ, Ritschl rejects the »’ 


old Protestant category of His threefold office. Jesus is 
primarily King, and his prophetic and priestly activities 
represent the spheres in which He exercises His kingship. 


The word “office” is itself misleading. For it Ritschl » 


substitutes the word “vocation.” In this way Ritschl was 
able at once to relate Christ’s life to ours, and yet to 
emphasise its uniqueness. He had His own personal 
vocation as we have ours. Ethically viewed ‘‘ what Jesus 
actually was and accomplished, that He is in the first place 
for Himself.’’! Like all other vocations, Christ’s vocation 
was individual. Unlike all other vocations, it was of 
universal range. With it, He combined no civil vocation. 
His was the vocation of the “founder of the Kingdom 
of God,” the ‘‘ Bearer of God’s moral lordship over men,”’ 
and His sufferings and death He endured as part of His 
loyalty to His vocation. Thus the ethical view of Christ’s 
vocation passes into the religious. Christ “ recognised the 
business of His vocation as the special ordinance of God 
for Him.” His life-work was the work of God, His personal 
self-end had the same content as is contained in the self-end 
of God. Thus in His self-end, ‘‘ God’s own self-end is 
made effective and manifest,’’ and Christ’s “‘ whole activity 
in discharge of His vocation forms the material of that 
complete revelation of God which is present in Him ”’ or, 
in other words, in Him “the Word of God is a human 
person.’’? 

On the origin of the Person of Christ, Ritschl refused 
to speculate. It “‘is not a subject for theological inquiry, 
because the subject transcends all inquiry.” ‘‘ As Bearer 
of the perfect revelation, Christ is given us that we may 

1 Op. cil., p. 442, * Op. cit., pp. 448-51, 
N 


A m 


194 THE MODERN PERIOD [vI1E 


believe on Him. When we do believe on Him, we find Him 
to be the Revealer of God.’’! Ritschl claimed that by his 
approach to the doctrine of Christ’s Person he had succeeded. 
better than the older orthodoxy in making clear Christ’s 
uniqueness and finality. The earlier theories had “‘ failed 
to face the question whether incarnation took place once 
and for ever in the Person of Jesus, or whether it may not 
be supplemented or repeated in the persons of others.” 
Ritschl, by interpreting the God-man from the standpoint 
of the Kingdom of God, and by showing that “that 
Kingdom was the direct correlate of the Divine self-end,” 
could show that “‘as the historical Author of this communion 
with God and with each other, Christ is necessarily unique 
in His own order.’ Of our relationship to Christ, Ritschl 
speaks soberly and reverently. That relationship is rather 
one of faith than love, for love implies the equality of the 
person loving with the beloved and ‘‘as a generic idea 
love to Christ is more indefinite than faith in Him,”’ and 
leaves undecided “‘ whether we put ourselves on a level 
with Christ or subordinate ourselves to Him, But faith 
in Christ includes the confession of His Godhead and His 
dominion over us, and thus denies the possibility of equality 
with Him.”’ ‘‘ As Christ takes the place of God, faith in 
Him is necessarily a kind of obedience.’’? 

If faith in Christ thus includes the confession of His 
Godhead, what of His exalted and pre-existent life ? 
Ritschl spoke here with much reserve, but it was reserve, 
and not denial. He speaks of Christ as “‘ the living Head 
of the community of God’s Kingdom,’’* and sees in the 
** mystery of Christ’s exaltation to the right hand of God ” 


1 Op. cit., pp. 451, 452. 2 Op. cit., p. 465, 

3 Op. cit., p. 594. Ritschl quotes in illustration St. Bernard’s remark that in 
“intercourse with the Bridegroom awe ceases, majesty is laid aside, and immediate 
‘anyisry intercourse is carried on as between lovers or neighbours.” On this 

itsch! comments, ‘‘ In the Latin Middle Ages, people purchased, by the verbal 
confession of Christ’s Godhead, freedom to love Him as a mere man, to imitate Him 
as such, to bring Him down to their own level, to play with Him.” 

4 Op. cit., p. 465, 


ViiT] RITSCHL . 195 


the guarantee that the purpose of His life was not frustrated, 
but rather fully accomplished in His death.! Thus Ritschl 
affirmed Christ’s exaltation, but it was to him a mystery, 
and, as he said in another context, “‘ I recognise mysteries 
in the religious life, but when anything is and remains a 
mystery, I say nothing about it.”’? Of the pre-existence of » 
Christ, Ritschl speaks with evident reluctance: ‘‘ The 
eternal Godhead of the Son is perfectly intelligible only as 
object of the Divine mind and will, that is, only for God 
Himself. But if at the same time we discount, in the case 
of God, the interval between purpose and accomplishment, 
then we get the formula that Christ exists for God eternally 
as that which He appears to us under the limitations of time. 
But only for God, since for us, as pre-existent, Christ is 
hidden.’’$ 

We have only to compare Ritschl’s theology with the 
great systems of Protestant orthodoxy, or with the elaborate 
speculations of a mediating theologian like Dorner, to 
realise its extreme concentration. Ritschl refused to 
speculate about God, or to force Christian truth into 
categories derived from an alien philosophy. Thus he 
belonged neither to the orthodoxy nor to the liberalism of 
his time, and complained of the intellectualism of both. 
Theology to him had as its sole concern, not what is hidden, ¥ 
but what is revealed, In an age and country where idealistic 
philosophy, destructive criticism and scientific materialism 
were imperilling the very existence of Christianity, Ritschl 
called men back to the central Christian certainty of the 
personal perfection of Christ in His vocation, which was at 
the same time the perfect revelation of God to men. It 
was a great service that he rendered to his age, and much 
of his teaching has passed into the common heritage of the 

1 Instruction in the Christian Religion, § 25. 

2 Justification and Reconciliation, p. 607. 

* Op. cit., p. 471. So Ritschl approved of Loofs’ formula. ‘‘ Credimus Christum 


fuisse preexistentem, hoc est ad talem persuasionis exitum pervenit nostra in Christum 
fidweia,” Giinther, op. cit., p. 303. 


196 THE MODERN PERIOD [VIII 


Protestant Churches. But it seems impossible to stop 
where he stopped. As we shall see, with few exceptions, 
his followers have either advanced beyond him to a con- 
_fession of Christ’s Godhead, which involves a more ex- 
plicit recognition of His exalted and pre-existent life, or 
have receded to a view of Christ which is content to ignore 
or deny His Godhead, and to speak of Him as the supreme 
religious hero of the race. This, as [hmels says, is surely 
not an accident. It is due to the immanent logic of facts.} 


The Ritschlians. 


Nearest to Ritschl in his exclusive concentration on the 
historic Christ is Herrmann? whose best-known book, 7'he 
Communion of the Christian with God, is written with a 
prophetic fervour alien from Ritschl’s temperament, and 
has had in England an influence greater, we imagine, than 
any of Ritschl’s writings. 

Herrmann’s aim is threefold. He would remind us that 
the history of Jesus must belong for the Christian, not to the 
past only, but to the present ; he would make the certainty 
of faith independent of the results of scientific investigation ; 
he would have us distinguish between faith and a mere 
affirmation of historic facts.4 This aim he sought to secure 
by bringing us back to the one sure and universal element 
in Christianity—the communion of the soul with the living 
God, through the mediation of Christ. He recognises, 
indeed, the mystic element in religion. The inner life of 
religion is always “‘a secret of the soul,” but the sacred 
moments in which we experience God’s manifest presence 
are not the distinctive characteristic of Christian piety, and 
he will have nothing to do with a mysticism which, in 
seeking to find God, leaves Christ behind. It is not enough 


1 Centralfragen der Dogmatik, p. 97. * ta.D. 1922. 

* First edit. a.D. 1886, Our references are from the 2nd Eng. edit. from the 4th 
German 

. Thiele, Die Christliche Wahrheitsgewissheit*, p. 158. 


VIIt] THE RITSCHLIANS . 197 


to say that “‘ we can only come to God by following Jesus.”’ 
Christ means more than that to the Christian. ‘‘ We do not 
merely come through God to Christ. It is truer to say that 
we find in God Himself nothing but Christ.’’! 

So the Christian’s supreme concern is to know the revela- 
tion of God in Christ. This revelation does not consist 
in a series of historic or dogmatic statements. God makes 
Himself known to us “ through a fact, on the strength of 
which we are able to believe in Him.’ That fact is Jesus 
Christ. In Him is one who knew Himself to be “ not in- 
ferior to the ideal for which He sacrificed Himself.” “ His 
life and death proclaim the conviction that no man who 
desires true life can do without Him.” This conviction 
is proved true in Christian experience. “‘ God makes Him- 
self known to us as the Power that is with Jesus in such a 
way that, amid all our distractions and the mist of doubt, 
He can never again entirely vanish from us. We are 
obliged then to confess that the existence of Jesus in this 
_world of ours is the fact in which God so touches us as to 
come into a communion with us that can endure.’ Nor 
is this certainty purely subjective. It rests on two objective 
facts—the historical fact of the Person of Jesus in all its 
matchless perfection, and the moral law within us with 
whose unconditional demands Christ puts us in accord.4 

Of Christ’s exalted life Herrmann speaks with glad con- 
fidence. “‘ He is now in perfection all that He desired to be, 
our Redeemer by the power of His personal life over ours.”’ 
He ‘‘ knows how near we come to Him, or how far we are 


from Him.” Yet of a personal communion with the » 


exalted Christ, Herrmann will not speak. ‘‘ The risen 
Christ is hidden from us.” It is part of our Christian hope 
that in the future we shall have personal fellowship with 
Jesus. But such personal fellowship with the exalted Jesus 
is beyond our reach on earth.® 


» 


1 The Communion of the Christian with God, p. 32. 2 Op. cit., p. 59. 
3 Op. cit., p. 98. * Op. cit., pp. 102, 103. * Op. cit., pp. 290-4. 


— 


198 THE MODERN PERIOD [v111 


It is possible to appreciate Herrmann’s horror of sensuous 
pictures of the exalted Christ, and of all attempts to have a 
communion with Christ which is not also communion with 
God, and yet to feel that he has failed adequately to inter- 
pret the implicates of his faith in Christ. Herrmann tells 
us that he would have preferred the gifts of a great preacher 
to those of a theologian. His book proved a telling sermon 
to his age; with strange power and beauty he depicted 
those elements in the Gospel picture of Christ which make 
the most immediate appeal to modern men. Through his 
book, many a man has learnt to see in Jesus, “ not a his- 
torical problem,” ‘‘ but a Reality before which he bows,” 
and to gain through the Person of Jesus “ the invincible 
certainty that it is the almighty power of His Father in 
heaven which rules in the boundless world.’ It was a 
great contribution, but it seems impossible to refuse to 
explore to the full the fact of Christ. Facts unrelated tend 
to become facts unbelieved. 

In the two greatest theologians of the Ritschlian school, 
Julius Kaftan and Haering, there is no such refusal to face 
the ultimate implicates of faith in Christ. To Julius 
Kaftan, Christianity means the life hid with Christ in God, 
and hence it is not only an ethical religion ; it is an ethical 
religion of redemption, so that Christians are meant to 
live in time as those who live in the eternal ; the eternal, 
which is not an undifferentiated infinite, but the eternal 
whose content is given us in the Exalted Christ.? It is 
with Christ the Exalted Lord that he begins his section on 
Christology in his Dogmatik.? The first statement in 

1 Op. cit., p. 200. 

* He tells us that it was as he realised that there were religions of redemption, 
and that Christianity was one of them, that he grasped this fact. See his interesting 
essay in the Zestschrift fiir Theologie und Kirche, July, 1908. This view finds full 
expression in his essay, ““ Die Paulinische Predigt vom Kreuz Jesu Christi,” re- 
Savi in his Zur Dogmatik, 1904, in which he emphasises the place which the 

esurrection of Christ had in Paul’s preaching, and the place it must have in ours, 
if the Protestant Church is to meet the needs which the Roman Church seeks to 


meet by the other-worldliness of monasticism. 
* First edit. 1897. Our references are from the 6th edit of 1909. 


VIII} THE RITSCHLIANS 199 


Christology is this, that Christ is God. He is the perfect 
revelation of God ; He Himself is God revealed in the flesh 
in human history. Yet faith has not to do with the past 
alone. It is concerned with present realities. It is the 
exalted Christ who is the object of our faith. It is this 
that we mean when we confess His Godhead. Yet this 
picture is given us in the Gospels. So from the exposition 
‘exalted Christ to whom we belong i is the Christ whose lifes) 
of the Exalted” Christ, he passes to the discussion of the 
historic Saviour. ‘‘ The life of Jesus Christ in the world 
was a divine life in human form. It was a divine life, 
in that it had for its content the working out of the divine 
will of love towards men; it was human, in that the fulfil- 
ment of this divine calling was manifested in fidelity to a 
human vocation. As divine, it was the perfect revelation of 
God in the flesh ; as human, the perfect sinless pattern of 
obedience to God, loyalty to vocation, and inner freedom 
from the world.’ ‘There was in His life a perfect unity 
with God.? So we have to pass to the thought of Christ 
as eternal. Kaftan has no enthusiasm for the term pre- 
existence. The formula he prefers is that “‘ Jesus is accord- 
ing to His Godhead from eternity in God.” Yet His pre- 
existence cannot be denied, or explained away as merely 
ideal. ‘‘ Our faith in Christ lacks adequate expression 
unless we affirm the eternal God in the historic Saviour, so 
that He who stands before us there, is He who from eternity 
is in God.” So, although the pre-existence of Christ 
transcends the reality which we can grasp, it is the necessary 
consequence of faith.% 

A similar result is reached, although by a different 
approach, in Haering’s suggestive book, The Christian 
Faith, which happily is translated into English.4 He, too, 
assumes that Christ is known to us in the first place through 
His work, the “‘ benefits ’’ He has conferred upon us. He 


1 Dogmatik*, pp. 431-43. 2 Op. cit., pp. 443-59. ? Op. cit., pp. 460-9. 
* Der Christliche Glaube, lst edit., 1906, K,T., 1915, from the 2nd edit, of 1912, 


200 THE MODERN PERIOD [vir 


begins his statement with the immediate utterances of 
faith, which expresses the Church’s experience of Christ’s 
work. Christ is, at once, the Kingly Prophet and the Kingly 
Priest. God in Him for us, we in Him for God—that is 
what He means to us. As Kingly Prophet, He is the per- 
sonal embodiment of the Father’s love. Through the 
effective presence of the love of the Father in Him, He so 
acts upon us that by our faith we can apprehend in Him 
the love of God. As Kingly Priest, through His work of 
God for us, He enables ‘‘ God to show His love, and give 
men to experience it in its full efficacy.” He does not belong 
to the past alone. His activity is still perceived by faith. 
Yet the work of the Exalted Lord is not different from that 
given us in historical revelation: “‘ The work of the exalted 
Lord rather consists in this: that He makes operative for 
us His historical work on earth.’ Sentimental converse 
in love with the Exalted Lord is thus excluded. Fellowship 
with Him shows itself rather in reverential trust. But 
“of the fact of such action of the Exalted Christ, as the 
King of His Church in subordination to God,” faith is 
certain.+ 

Such statements are the immediate utterances of Christian 
faith. They lead us to the confession of Christ’s Lordship,? 
and compel us to pass from the immediate utterances of 
faith to the exploration of its “ presuppositions and in- 
ferences.” The classic attempts to explain Christ’s person 
seem to him open to objection, both from the side of faith 
and of knowledge. Yet it is not enough to condemn their 
failure, and, ourselves merely to affirm the immediate 
utterances of faith, for these immediate utterances of faith 
“rise in the last resort, to a height which seems to point 
beyond themselves.”” So Haering arrives at the doctrine 


1 E.T., pp. 578-667. 

2 Haering prefers to call Christ Lord, rather than God; on the ground that 
as the full revelation of God, He is more than any ‘‘ god’ of paganism and, for the 
same reason, is not ‘ God,” otherwise He would not be a Revelation of God, op. cit., 


p- 670. 


vIIt] “LIBERALISM” AND ESCHATOLOGY 201 


of Christ’s real pre-existence. But it is to him a “ boundary- 
thought,’! which transcends the power of our knowledge, 
and yet is an implicate of Christian faith. The doctrine 
expresses two intimately related truths. ‘‘ The love of God, 
which was effective for us in Christ as the Son, is so truly 
the love of God and the effective self-revelation of God’s 
own nature,’ as to be “ the love of the Father to the Son 
in the mystery of the eternal life of God, and, therefore, as 
no other word is available for us, in a state of real pre- 
existence.” The second truth expressed is this: ‘‘ This 
Son, who is eternally loved by God, though sent to the world 
by the Father, likewise came to the world by the prompting 
of His own love.” Thus this “ boundary-thought”’ of 
Christ’s real pre-existence has the religious value of making 
more impressive the love of the Father and the humble 
self-devotion of the Son, and still more vivid and admirable 
the truths connected with the sacred seasons of Christmas, 
Good Friday and Easter Day. But Haering recognises the 
difficulty of this conception for many in our modern world, 
and is careful to distinguish it from the immediate utterances 
of Christian faith.? 


** Taberalism ”’ and Eschatology. 


If some Ritschlians thus passed from the acceptance of 
the fact of Christ’s Godhead to a cautious exploration of 
its implicates, others minimised the fact, and substituted 
for the confession of Christ’s Godhead a recognition of His 
unique religious importance.? Ritschl himself had depre- 
cated any attempt to write the life of Jesus, for such an 
attempt “implies the surrender of the conviction ”’ “ that 

1 Grenzgedanke. In the E.T, the word is translated “limiting conception.” 
Christ’s pre-existence is similarly described in Kirn’s Grundriss der Hvangelischen 

 Dogmatik (1st edit. 1905), 7th edit. 1921, p, 107, although he prefers to speak 
instead of Christ as ‘‘ superhistorical,”’ 

* E.T., pp. 704, 705. 

* In the next few paragraphs I have embodied material from an article on Our 
Preachiug of Jesus and the Mystery of His Life, Congregational Quarterly, Oct., 
1923. 


202 THE MODERN PERIOD gest 


Jesus belonged to a higher order than all other men.’’! 
Yet it was from these Ritschlians especially that there 
came those genial presentations of the life and teaching of 
Jesus, which captured the heart of many modern men, and 
seemed to place Jesus right in our age. The earlier lives 
of Jesus had often been rationalist and offensive to Christian 
faith, but these accounts of His life and teaching were 
obviously inspired by Christian enthusiasm. We think 
of such books as Harnack’s What is Christianity? or 
Wendt’s T'eaching of Jesus, or Bousset’s Jesus—to name 
only those which in England, too, have been widely in- 
fluential. All are books of rare charm and power. They 
are written by men who gladly confess how much they owe 
to Jesus, but they tend to make of Him, not so much the 
object of faith, as its first example. Jesus leads us to God, 
and only He can fully do so. It is through Him that we 
believe in God the Father. Our faith in God in this sense 
rests in Him, but in this sense only ; and passages in the 
Gospels which speak of Him as mediator, or as the object 
of our faith, they tend to excise or explain away. ‘The 
development of later thought was often held to be the work 
of Paul, and the distinction was thus made between the 
Religion of Jesus of the first three Gospels and the Gospel 
of Christ which Paul and the later Church proclaimed. A 
generation ago, this view of Jesus seemed to many as secure 
as it was popular. It was a view, devout, gracious, and 
modern. It made of Jesus the supreme religious hero of the 
race, but it would not call Him God, and it refused to face 
Kahler’s objection that so to trust a man, however great 
and however heroic, was, if He were man alone, idolatry.? 
Confidently writers of this school bade us see in the pro- 
clamation of God as Father, and of the infinite worth to 
Him of every human soul, the whole of the message of 
Jesus, and the claim was widely made that from the Gospel 


1 Justification and Reconciliation, p. 3. 
* Kahler, Angewandte Dogmen, IL., p. 97 


vit} * LIBERALISM”? AND ESCHATOLOGY 203 


of St. Mark there had been derived a picture of Jesus 
intelligible in itself, and acceptable to modern men. 

Such a confidence to-day sounds strange and naive. 
It is generally recognised that the reconstruction of the 
life of Jesus was obtained by excising or explaining away 
elements in the Gospel story which refuse to be modernised, 
and by supplying interpretations of His actions which are 
lacking in the synoptic texts. With justice Wrede com- 
plained, in a book published in 1901,! that the so-called 
scientific life of Jesus was really a piece of psychological 
guesswork. Wrede himself sought to prove that it was only 
after Jesus was believed to have risen that the disciples 
thought of Him as the Messiah. His book thus made of 
Mark’s Gospel, no longer an historical record, but a book 
written in the interests of a dogmatic theory. If we held 
his view, it would be impossible to suppose that any real 
knowledge of the life of Jesus can be derived from this, our 
earliest Gospel. Arbitrary as his treatment was, it was only 
the same sort of arbitrariness as the “ liberal ’’* scholars 
had used. After scepticism such as this, it was little wonder 
that when Drews in 1909 revived the theory that Jesus 
never lived, he found for his fantastic view a wide hearing, 
and the fierce fury with which he was attacked by “ liberal ”’ 
scholars seemed to show that some of them had grown 
uneasy at their own construction. 

Still more damaging to the “ liberal ’’ view of Jesus, has 
been the eschatological interpretation of Him. So long ago 
as 1888 Baldensperger showed that the Jews, in the time 
of our Lord, looked not so much for an earthly kingdom, 
as for a supernatural manifestation of the “‘ age to come,”’ 
and Baldensperger, refusing to ignore or excise the apoca- 
lyptic elements in the Gospels, sought to relate to them the 


1 Das Messiasgehermnis in den Evangelien. 

* The word “‘liberal’’ is here used in the German sense as opposed to “ positive,” 
i.e. a8 opposed to the recognition that in Christ we have a revelation given us which 
is normative and final, although our understanding of it may be incomplete and 
transitory. 


204 THE MODERN PERIOD [viir 


Messianic consciousness of Jesus.! The book was carefully 
and judiciously written, and perhaps lacked influence just 
because of its moderation and restraint. In 1892 appeared 
the manifesto of the extreme Apocalyptic school, the little 
book on The Preaching of Jesus on the Kingdom of God,? by 
Johannes Weiss. When the book appeared, Johannes Weiss 
was only twenty-nine years old, and the book lacks nothing 
of the ruthlessness and vigour of youth. The Kingdom of 
God in Christ’s preaching is here depicted, not as love to 
God and service to man, but as the strange and supernatural 
realm of Jewish Apocalypse. It is hard to imagine any 
picture of Jesus in more violent opposition to that of the 
“liberal” school. Jesus, believing that in the upper world 
Satan had already been defeated, looked for the Kingdom’s 
immediate emergence upon earth with Himself as King. 
Hence there was no need, and no time, for Him to delay 
over problems of teaching. Quickly must His disciples 
haste from town to town, lest the Kingdom should appear 
before it had been adequately announced. When, to His 
disappointment, He found the people unprepared for the 
Kingdom’s coming, He resolved to give His life as a ransom 
for many, feeling that His death was a stage in the divine 
plan, and would hasten on His triumphant reappearance, 
when God would destroy this corrupt and devil-haunted 
world, and, by His sole act, create a new world in which 
Jesus and His disciples should have dominion. 

Kight years later, Johannes Weiss issued a greatly en- 
larged edition of his book, in which he admitted that his 
first sketch had been one-sided and extreme ; in its con- 
centration on the eschatological preaching of Jesus, it had 
unduly ignored the ethical, and had failed to recognise that 
there are in the Gospels not only prophecies of the end of 
this world-order, but sayings and parables of a freshness 
M 2 Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu im Lichte der Messianischen Hoffnungen seiner 


* Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes. For a criticism of this ‘‘ eschatological ” 
interpretation of Jesus see earlier, Chapter I, pp. 16-9. 


VIIt] “LIBERALISM” AND ESCHATOLOGY 205 


time can never stale, and moral commands whose inner 
beauty secures their lasting worth for men. 

There is no such adjustment or compromise in the most 
famous book of the eschatological school, Schweitzer’s 
From Reimarus to Wrede, published in 1906 and translated 
into English in 1910 under the title The Quest of the His- 
torical Jesus. German critics have not unnaturally com- 
plained of its over-confidence, and have suggested that 
Schweitzer should have named his book not From Reimarus 
to Wrede but From Reimarus to Myself, for Schweitzer wrote 
as if he regarded his short sketch of the life of Jesus, 
published in 1901, as the final word. With mordant wit, 
he denounces the “ liberal ’’ reconstruction of the life of 
Jesus. ‘‘ The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious 
history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus believing 
that, when it had found Him, it could bring Him straight 
into our time as a Teacher and a Saviour. It loosed the 
bonds by which He had been riveted for centuries to the 
strong rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see 
life and movement coming into the figure once more, and 
the historical Jesus, advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. 
But He does not stay. He passes by our time and returns 
to His own.” “ The historical Jesus ”’ is “ to our time a 
stranger and an enigma.”! 

It may be true, as Schweitzer says, that ‘“ there is nothing 
more negative than the result of the critical study of the 
life of Jesus,”* yet this negative result itself has value. 
If the most assiduous and brilliant scholarship has failed 
to make permanent its reconstruction of the life of Jesus, 
it seems not unreasonable to conclude that the attempt 
failed just because it is impossible to construe Jesus in 
purely human terms, and that the Jesus of the Gospels is 


1 The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 397. Canon Streeter shrewdly remarks, 
‘Schweitzer himself cannot quite eseape the charge of modernising; his own 
boldly outlined portrait is alittlelike the advaal ye of Nietzsehe dressed in Galilean 
robes,” Foundations, p. 77. 

2 Op, cit., p. 396. 


206 THE MODERN PERIOD {v1II 


something other than the greatest of all human teachers, 
the first true believer in God the Father. 


The Religio-historical School. 


Ritschl had unduly isolated Christianity and refused 
to consider it in the context of other religions. In not 
unnatural reaction, the extreme left wing of his school 
have, in this century, broken away from Ritschlianism to 
form, with some other “ liberals,’ the Religio-historical 
school, in which Christianity is discussed as one phase 
of the spiritual achievement of the race, and the special 
claims made for Christ explained by analogies from ethnic 
ideas current in the early centuries.1 The school has its 
prime importance in the domain of scholarship, but from 
it has come one great systematic thinker, Troeltsch,? 
whose work is likely to have an increasing influence in 
our country. 

Is Christ the final revelation of God ? If not, it is hard 
to see what right Christianity has to be a missionary religion, 
for, although it might still claim superiority, it could not 
claim absolute validity. In the East, this has for long 
been the life-problem of Christianity, and the contraction 
of the modern world is rapidly making it the life-problem 
of Christianity also in the West. To Troeltsch this problem 
has been of engrossing interest, and a discussion of it can 
have no better basis than his formal treatment of it in his 
book on The Absolute Validity of Christianity and the History 
of Religions.$ 

1 From this school came the Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbiicher, a series of 
brilliantly written and widely circulated popular books, of which Bousset’s Jesus, 
already referred to, is perhaps the best known in this country. 

2 1865-1923. 

* Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte, first published in 
1902, second and slightly modified edition, 1912. A brief account of the book is 
given in the present writer’s Redemption, Hindu and Christian, 1919, pp. 14-8; a 
longer, in Bouquet’s Is Christianity the Final Religion? 1921, pp. 189-236. The 
account given in the text is based on the writer’s article, The Finality of the 


Christian Religion, London Quarterly Review, Oct., 1922. For a full exposition of 
Troeltsch’s works, see Sleigh, The Sufficiency of Christianity, 1923. 


vi1t] THE RELIGIO-HISTORICAL SCHOOL 207 


The customary claim for the absolute validity of Chris- 
tianity Troeltsch regards as mere naiveté, impossible now 
that history has linked up the present and the past in an 
inseparable whole. Nowhere does Christianity appear as 
an absolute religion, free from the limits of time and age. 
The attempt to distinguish between kernel and _ shell 
Troeltsch rejects. The kernel is as much conditioned by 
the shell as the shell by the kernel. Nor will he admit 
the contention of Schleiermacher that at least in the person 
of Christ there is something absolute and unconditioned. 
Christ, as an individual, necessarily shared in the limitations“ 
of the historical. Christianity then is a purely historical 
phenomenon, limited and conditioned, as the other religions 
are. 

Thus to Troeltsch the historical is necessarily the relative. 
Yet he will not admit that his conclusions involve an 

unlimited relativism. The history of religions does not 
present a mass of religious forces among which choice is 
impossible. The lower phases of religion are irrelevant 
to our quest, and the great ethical and spiritual religions 
are not numerous. ‘Troeltsch claims that an honest com- » 
parison supports the belief that Christianity is the highest 
of all religions. By proclaiming a personal and living God 
who unites us to Himself, it meets the needs expressed both 
by the legal and the redemptive religions, and thus is not 
only the climax: it is the converging point of the two 
classic tendencies of historic religions.} 

Beyond this Troeltsch will not go. Christianity is an 
historical phenomenon, and, as such, limited and temporary. 
All men’s deepest needs have been so far fulfilled in it, but, 


1 In his lecture on Christianity among World-Religions, written just before his 
death, and published in his Christian Thought, Troeltsch seems unwilling any longer 
to claim as much as this. Christianity is the religion for Europe. “ It is the way 
in which, being what we are, we receive and react to, the revelation of God.” 
“* But this does not preclude the possibility that other racial groups, living under 
entirely different cultural conditions, may experience their contact with the Divine 
Life in quite a different way, and may themselves also possess a religion from which 
they cannot sever themselves so long as they remain what they are.” Truth thus 
becomes ‘‘ polymorphous.”’ 


208 THE MODERN PERIOD {viIt 


just as some of the demands it meets are demands it has 
revealed, so it is possible that new demands would be re- 
vealed if a higher revelation came. We cannot then speak 
of the “ unsurpassability ” of Christianity. All we can 
claim is this: that nowhere else can we find God so 
well as in the life-world of the prophets and of Christianity, 
and of this whole life-world Jesus is for. us the source and 
symbol. : 

Troeltsch’s book naturally led to an animated contro- 
versy. As Griitzmacher pointed out, faith cannot be 
content to substitute for the belief in the absoluteness of 
Christianity a proof of its superiority over all other religions. 
Faith sees, in the forgiveness and new life which has come 
through the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ, a gift 
which can never be surpassed on God’s side, because it 
meets the deepest needs of men, needs which it has no 
reason to suppose will ever change. The experience of 
Christ leads regularly to the confession that He is the way, 
the truth, and the life, for allthe world. Even the possibility 
that this was not so would make the Christian experiences 
uncertain—indeed, non-existent. If Christ is not the Lord 
of the world for all men, why should I subordinate myself 
to Him as my Lord ? If He does not belong to the future, 
why of the past or the present ? It is the nature of faith 
to form absolute judgements. This naiveté, as Troeltsch 
calls it, belongs to faith’s essence, and, if this be removed, 
faith itself is lost. 

In his full and incisive discussion,? Ihmels similarly 
complains that Troeltsch so little realises the difference 
between saying, ‘‘ I can nowhere find God so well as in the 
life-world of the prophets and of Christianity,’ and saying 
“ T have truly found God ” that, in one place, he puts them 
side by side, as if they were identical. But between the 
two expressions there is a difference which is fundamental. 


1 Eigenart und Probleme der positiven Theologie, 1909, p. 36. 
* Die Christliche Wahrheitsgewisshert*?, 1914, pp. 160-86. 


vit] - KAHLER | 209 


It is one thing to be a Christian because in Christ we have 
the perfect revelation of God ; it is another thing to be a 
Christian because, as Troeltsch says, Christianity is for us, 
and up to the present, the most perfect form of religion. 
As Ihmels puts it, in another book;! it is the difference 
between intercourse with God and communion with Him. 
We have intercourse with many men whom we only partly 
know, and in all religions men have such intercourse with 
God. But communion is only possible with the few we 
really know and trust. It is the claim of Christianity to be 
the one religion of true communion with God—a communion 
mediated by Jesus Christ, in whom God is known. Because 
of this, Christianity sees in the coming of Christ something 
unique and inexplicable. 

If we accept these criticisms, we seem driven to conclude 
that Troeltsch’s view means a different God and a different 
Christ from that of classic Christian faith. But the dis- 
cussion Troeltsch’s book evoked should make it impossible 
to think of Christianity in isolation. If we affirm, in any 
sense, Christ’s Godhead, we cannot, with the older 
Ritschlianism, refuse to face the relation of Christianity 
to other religions, but are driven to seek some answer to 
the problem of its universality and finality. 


Kahler. 


In the brief space at our disposal, it has seemed best 
to describe as fully as possible the development of 
Ritschlianism, not only because Ritschlianism dominated 
the age which terminated with the Great War, but because 
of the special significance both of its successes and its 
failures. But Ritschlianism did not destroy the movements 
described in the previous chapter, although it lessened their 
influence. Of the further development of the kenotic 
theory in this period in Germany it is unnecessary to speak, 
as the theory has in recent years attracted more attention 

1 Cenlralfragen der Dogmatik in der Gegenwart, 1911, p. 46. 
oO 


210 THE MODERN PERIOD [vIq1 


in England than in Germany, and it must suffice to speak 
later of the English modifications of Thomasius’ theory.! 
It is necessary, however, to say something of the develop- 
ment of the other great Christology, that of Dorner, as it 
has received in this period in the writings of Kahler and 
Seeberg a simpler and more attractive form. 

Kahler,? more than any theologian we have dealt with 
since Calvin, was a Biblicist in his theology. Like Ritschl, 
Kahler developed his theology from the fundamental article 
of justification by faith, emphasised the content of Christ’s 
historic life, and subordinated speculation to the practical 
issues of the Christian life, but he differed from Ritschl 
in that he was willing to give full place to the 
superhistorical as well as to the historical elements of 
Christianity. 

To Kahler, theology has as its prime concern the 
doctrines of the Saviour and of salvation.* It is in connexion 
with the first of these doctrines that he deals with the 
doctrine of the Trinity. With Dorner, he follows the 
Augustinian tradition, and emphasises strongly the unity 
of the one personal God, but, whereas’ in Dorner the 
doctrine is discussed with a prolixity which obscures the 
issues of faith, and is derived as much from speculation 
as from revelation, in Kahler it is discussed concisely, and 
with great reserve, and is affirmed, not on the basis of 
speculation, but as the necessary implicate of justifying 
faith. The Christian stands in a relationship of faith to 
the living and exalted Christ, which compels a confession 
of His Godhead and an acknowledgement of His unity 
with the eternal mediator of all revelation as of creation. 
And so from the Trinity of manifestation, we pass inevitably 
to the Trinity of being. Thus the “ theologoumenon of 


1 The most important German book of recent years on the Kenosis was written 
by a Swedish theologian, Bensow, Die Lehre von der Kenose, 1903, which gives, not 
only an elaborate constructive statement, but a full history of the movement. 

? A.D. 1835-1912. Our account is based on the 3rd edit. of his Die Wissenschaft 
der Christlichen Lehre, 1905. 

3 “ Soterology ” and “ Soteriology ”’ as he puts it. 4 pp. 325, 326. 


vit] KAHLER 211 


the Trinity,” although it has only a relative value for 
acquiring salvation, is indispensable to theology. 

In his statement of the doctrine of Christ’s Person, 
Kahler likewise keeps close to history and experience. The 
uniqueness of Christ’s manhood finds its explanation in 
the Godhead of the Son. Thus faith’s confession of Christ, 
derived from the presentation of Him in the Bible, leads 
to the problem of linking together the Godhead and the 
manhood of Christ. Any attempts to solve the problem 
must be regarded as one-sided which fail to recognise that 
the doctrine of Christ is the doctrine of the Saviour, and 
so must be adequate in all respects to the needs of salvation. 
The traditional attempts to explain the Person of Christ as 
two independent entities or two persons united in one 
single life, Kahler rejects as failing to secure this recognition. 
His own theory he thus propounds: “The union of the 
Godhead and the manhood becomes intelligible, if it be 
regarded as a reciprocity of two personal movements, on 
the one hand, a generative activity from the standpoint 
of the eternal Godhead, and, on the other hand, a receptive 
activity from the standpoint of the developing humanity.’ 
In this way the human soul of Jesus, in its progressive 
moral development, appropriated the content of the divine 
life so that His humanity could become the means for God’s 
saving work for men.* Kahler then proceeds from this 
standpoint to interpret the Person of Christ from the 
doctrine of salvation, and to show that in the historical 
Christ God has met our need for revelation and reconcilia- 
tion,? for the God-man’s increasing unity with God was 
manifested in the development and consummation of His 
prophetic, priestly and kingly work for men. 

A not dissimilar interpretation of Christ’s Person is 
given by R. Seeberg, the leader of the Modern Positive 


1 p. 330. 2 p. 339. 
8 “ Christology must be not only Soterology, but Soteriology,” pp. 343, 344. 
4 pp. 344-80. 


212 THE MODERN PERIOD [VIII 


school. This school is “ positive”’ in that it seeks to 
preserve the full Christian faith in the final revelation of God 
in Christ ; it is ‘modern ”’ in that it attempts to express 
this faith, not by a repristination of old dogmas, but in 
a form intelligible to modern men and in harmony with 
the best thought of to-day. Influenced in part by Ritschl, 
it condemns the philosophic Agnosticism of the Ritschlian 
school, and seeks to remove the isolation of theology, and 
to relate it to the study of philosophy and religion. 
Seeberg’s views find their simplest expression in a series 
of popular lectures given at Berlin University and trans- 
lated under the title The Fundamental Truths of the Christian 
Religion,” and it is on this that our account will be based. 
The book begins with a discussion of the nature and 
conception of religion, and of Christianity as the absolute 
religion. Having thus dealt in outline with the truth of 
Christianity, Seeberg proceeds to deal with the particular 
fundamental truths of the Christian religion. First of 
these is the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. It is summed 
up in this: ‘ Jesus’ disposition and Jesus’ will, as He be- 
comes manifest in His working in word and deed, is holy, 
almighty love-energy.”’ ““Therewith is Christ’s nature known. 
This is, at the same time, knowledge of God. The God 
who is revealed to us in Christ is holy, almighty love-will.’’? 
‘But “ if God be thus sovereign love,” ‘‘ why do not all men 
come to faith and thereby to blessedness?”’* So Seeberg 
passes to the problem of human sin, and to Jesus, the 
Redeemer of sinners. As we look at the historic Jesus, we 
realise the ‘“‘ paradox of His self-consciousness.”’ He felt 
Himself to be the organ of God, God’s servant. Yet it is 
insufficient to describe Him as “ the first Christian, and, 
in the full sense of the word, the only believer that the 


1 The programme of the school can be conveniently studied in the Studien 
zur Systematischen Theologie, II. and IIL., 1905 and 1909 by Griitzmacher, one of its 
younger leaders. 

* E.T. from 4th German edit., 1908. The view is defended and fully developed 
in his recent Dogmatik, 1., 1924, pp. 366-95. 

* pp. 145, 146. * p. 154. 


vit] SEEBERG 213 


history of the world knows.’’ There is the other side of the 
paradox. ‘The man who had come ‘to minister, not to 
be ministered unto,’ was at the same time conscious of 
being the Lord of the world ”’: the judge, who should come 
again in the glory of heaven. And this paradox was 
preserved in His disciples’ teaching after the Ascension. 
‘* All the religious experience of their soul can be gathered 
together in the thought that He is the Lord, who now 
reigns, and will come again to judge the quick and the 
dead.’’ Yet “ the same men did not grow weary of holding 
up His humility and willingness to bear suffering, His faith 
and His courage, as an example.’’! 

How is this paradox to be solved? Science seeks to 
unite facts into a system, and fills up gaps by hypotheses. 
“A theory of the person of Christ can be obtained only 
by way of a scientific hypothesis, and this hypothesis will 
approach to the truth so far as it explains and unites 
the facts.” 

The hypothesis which Seeberg suggests is this: “ The 
God-will that guides the history of mankind to salvation 
entered into history in Jesus, became man in Him, and 
worked after the method of human history in His words 
and deeds.”’ It created the man Jesus for its organ, and, 
uniting itself with the man Jesus from the first moment 
of His existence, acted on Him and permeated His feeling, 
thought and will. ‘‘ What He felt, willed, thought, said 
and did, was worked in Him by the Personal God-will that 
dwelt in Him.” That personal God-will was not “a mere 
operative force which proceeds from God as it is active 
elsewhere also, but the Divine Person Himself. A person 
is nothing else than conscious personal will.” “ Jesus felt 
Himself in His personal completeness, including the God- 
will which had become His will, as another, a second in 
relation to the Father. His Divine personal will or His 
Divine personality was for His own consciousness the 


1 pp. 205-10. 


214 THE MODERN PERIOD [VIII 


eternal Son of the Father in heaven.” Yet the expression 
and effect of the divine presence in Jesus during His earthly 
life had a limit, not the limitation of sin, but the limitation 
of human nature as such. This then was “ the secret of the 
soul of Jesus ’’ and the explanation of the combination in 
Him of glory and humility. “So far as Jesus knew and 
felt Himself the organ of God, His Son, He was Lord of the 
world, for the world is God’s, and God is in Him.” Thus 
“He Himself was, according to the peculiar content of His 
soul, God. And again, He was God’s servant, for not from 
His human soul, as it was by nature, but from God, came 
the sovereignty and power.’ What then of the doctrine 
of the Trinity ? Seeberg claims that his theory conserves 
it, though not in some of its popular forms. The three- 
foldness is not of “ persons,” but of volitional acts, which 
together with their realisation, are eternally coexistent. 
In Jesus Christ was manifest and operative the personal 
divine will for the salvation of mankind.} 

Such is Seeberg’s hypothesis. It has been much attacked, 
and certainly does not lack courage. It is of interest as 
the work of one of the most learned of students of theology, 
who desires at once to reaffirm the Apostolic witness to 
Jesus and to conserve to the full the unity of the divine 
life. It may be doubted if his view is an adequate expression 
of Christ’s full humanity, or if it would permanently secure 
that belief in His real Divinity which Seeberg and his 
school have been eager to preserve and strengthen in the 
modern world. 


The Recent Reaction. 

The re-exploration of Christianity which had its source 
in Schleiermacher has been pursued in Germany with a 
thoroughness and patience without parallel in Christian 
history. But even before the war there were signs in 


1 From pp. 210-36. The whole of Seeberg’s subtle argument here should be 
studied. 


VIII] THE RECENT REACTION 215 


Germany of reaction both against. its method and its 
results ; and it would seem that the great movement which 
Schleiermacher originated has now run its course. 

Of significance here is Schaeder’s complaint that theology 
since Schleiermacher’s time has been ‘“ anthropocentric,”’ 
not “theocentric’’: centred not in God’s revelation and 
work, but in man’s experiences and needs, so that, in 
consequence, “we have suffered from the belittlement 
of God in theology. Little man has cast upon God his 
shadow.” We have measured by human standards, and 
so the majesty of God, and His Christ, have thus been 
obscured.1_ We have forgotten that faith has for its one 
object God ; so that Jesus belongs to our certainty of God, 
not as the mere Jesus of history, but as the risen, present 
and exalted Lord.? 

Of still greater importance is Otto’s book The Holy, 
which, first published in 1916, has passed through more 
than ten editions, and has had decisive influence in Germany 
even in most unlikely quarters. 

Otto’s book is a protest against the attempt to interpret 
religion simply by its intellectual and ethical elements. 
The distinctive element in religion is awe, the response to 
the mysterium tremendum of the Divine. This is true of the 
lowest phases of religion ; it is true also of the highest, and 
of Christianity itself. The sinner knows that, whilst God 
is holy, he is “ profane,” and so is at once attracted and 
repelled by the Divine. The Gospel speaks, indeed, of God 
drawing near to men in Christ. But, in the New Testament, 
this is not regarded as something obvious; it is a tremendous 
paradox, an act of inconceivable grace, and to take away 
this paradox from Christianity is to superficialise it beyond 

1 Schaeder, Theozentrische Theologie, I.?, pp. 210, 211. 

* Op. cit., IL., p. 259. 

* For an account of this book and an attempt to indicate its bearing on Christian 
theology, I would venture to refer to my article, The Paradox of Religion: a 
Study of Otto’s The Holy, in the Expositor, Feb., 1923, some sentences of which 


I quote above. The book has since been admirably translated by Harvey under 
the title The Idea of the Holy. 


1 


216 THE MODERN PERIOD [viii 


recognition. Christ not only proclaimed the holy God. 
To His disciples, He was Himself the Holy in manifestation. 
In His life and mission they saw and felt the revealed 
presence of the Divine. This recognition was not primarily 
rational. It was not based, as some modern scholars have 
assumed, on Christ’s own claims, nor on the disciples’ 
surmises as to His “inner consciousness.” It was spon- 
taneous and unreasoned—a religious intuition. So Christ 
was not just a prophet, a “ divinator.” He Himself has 
become in His person and work the object of the “‘ divina- 
tion’’ of the Holy. He is more than a prophet. He is 
the Son. | 

Otto’s book is obviously capable of grave perversion, 
and has already been utilised by those who are unwilling 
to learn anything from modern theology, and who seek 
in religion, not the revealed, but the occult. But Otto 
himself writes as one who recognises the Protestant 
obligation of seeking to understand the revelation of God 
in Christ, and to present it in plain and simple speech, and 
his book is a much needed corrective to that self-centredness 
which has been the malaise of modern Protestant Chris- 
tianity. There has been a presentation of God’s love in 
Christ which has been irreligious ; for it lacked the dis- 
tinctively religious sense of awe. We know Christ through 
what He has done for us, but we may not treat Him as 
a means and not an end, nor, through concentration on 
human needs and aspirations, miss the wonder of the 
Gospel, and make the truth of the Incarnation so simple 
as to be incredible. Faith in our divine Redeemer is more 
than imitation; more even than trust or obedience. It 
may havefear. It must have awe. 


The Contribution of English Theology. 

We saw in the previous chapter the strange isolation 
of English theology in the first and larger part of the 
nineteenth century, and the reluctance of helieving 


ViiT] ENGLISH CHRISTOLOGY 217 


theologians to recognise the results of the new Biblical 
scholarship. By the beginning of the period with which 
this chapter deals, English theology was already losing its 
isolation, and the modern view of the Bible had begun to 
win acceptance even in the most conservative circles. In 
the latter part of this period, much English theology was 
even unduly imitative, and, by some, the translated 
writings of the more brilliant and ingenious German 
“liberals ’’ were taken as the last word of modern scholar- 
ship, whilst the contributions of German “ positive ” 
theologians were, for the most part, untranslated and 
unread, and controversies in England followed patiently, 
and even slavishly, the course of controversies on the 
Continent. 

In constructive theology, this imitation has been less 
marked than in Biblical scholarship. Whereas in this period 
the Hegelian interpretation of Christianity and the “‘ke- 
notic ’? explanation of Christ’s person have been largely 
abandoned in Germany, in Great Britain Hegelianism has 
had great influence, whilst much Christology has been of the 
‘‘ kenotic ” type. 


The Hegelian Reinterpretation, 


The reinterpretation of Christianity by the English 
Hegelians received its most attractive presentation in the 
profoundly religious writings of T. H. Green and Edward 
Caird. 

The teaching of T. H. Green! on Christianity issummed up 
in his beautiful, though elusive, Lay-Sermons, in which, 
with extraordinary sympathy, he reinterpreted the ideas 
of Christianity and reaffirmed the demands of its austere 
ethics—demands which, as his friends have testified, his 
own life signally fulfilled. To him the statements of the 
Christian creed had value, not as historic facts, but as 
expressions of ideas which can still be re-experienced. He 

1 4.v. 1836-82. 


218 THE MODERN PERIOD [VIII 


recognised that ‘‘to most of us it is under the name of 
Christ that all thoughts of God have come since first we 
were capable of them. God, so to speak, has been incarnate 
to us, has died and risen again for us in the person of Jesus, 
ever since there has been for us a God at all.” He admitted 
“that the system of practical ideas, or of life resting on 
ideas, which we call Christianity, though its roots are as 
old as mankind, would not exist but for definite past events 
and actions and personal influences, and that among these 
some far outweigh all others in importance. There came 
one who spake as never man spake, yet proclaimed himself 
the son of man, and was conscious in the very meanness 
of human life, in its final shame of death, of the communica- 
tion of God to himself, and through him to mankind. 
There came another, who, bringing with him certain 
‘metaphysical’ conceptions, the result of the philosophy 
of the time, found them in this man, whom death could not 
hold, suddenly become real: who in spirit, yet with a light 
above the brightness of the sun, saw manifested in him that 
which Philo and the Stoics knew must be; even the 
heavenly man in whose death all barriers were broken down, 
that all in the participation of his life might be equal before 
God.’’ He would have ‘“‘ no one rashly tamper ”’ with the 
beliefs of simple Christians who feel that their discovery of 
God depends on “ evidence of God’s operation in past or 
present miracle,” but for himself Christianity denoted 
rather ‘“‘ an immanent God, a God present in the believing 
love of him and the brethren, a Christ within us, a continu- 
ous resurrection.’’? 

A similar conception of Christianity is expounded with 
systematic clearness in Edward Caird’s second course of 
Gifford Lectures on The Evolution of Religion.? The 
importance of Christianity to him lies here. ‘It is a law 


1 On “ Faith,” Works of T. H. Green, II1*., p. 201. 
2 The Wiiness of God, op. cit., pp. 241 and 244. 
3 Delivered in 1891-2. Our references are from the 3rd edit., 1899, Vol. II, 


vit] ENGLISH CHRISTOLOGY 219 


of human history that principles and tendencies which are 
really universal, should at first make their appearance in an 
individual form, as if bound up with the passing existence 
of a particular nation or even of asingle man. The general 
idea needs, so to speak, to be embodied or incarnated, to 
be ‘made flesh and dwell among men’ in all the fullness of 
realisation in a finite individuality before it can be known 
and appreciated in its universal meaning.’’! So the life 
of Jesus, “‘ however otherwise we may conceive it,’’ remains 
“to us the typical expression of religious feeling ; for it 
brings the consciousness of finitude into a perfect unity 
with the consciousness of the infinite, and reconciles the 
monotheistic ideas of the evil that is in the world and of the 
transcendence of God, with the pantheistic idea of the 
immanence of God both in man and in nature. Jesus 
Christ, we may say, first discovered man’s true relation to 
God and lived in it. From no other life, even in the im- 
perfect records of it that have come down to us, do we get 
the same impression of reconciliation with self and God, of 
conscious union with a divine Spirit, manifesting itself 
immediately in self-conquest and devotion to the service 
of humanity.’’? 

Thus ‘‘ Christianity was simply the universal principle 
of religion, coming to self-consciousness in the nation which 
was ripest for the expression of it,’”’? and the significance 
of Jesus is to be sought not in Himself, but in the idea 
which He embodied. ‘‘ By him, as by no other individual 
before, the pure idea of a divine humanity was apprehended 
and made into the great principle of life ; and, consequently, 
in so far as that idea can be realised in an individual—and. 
it was a necessity of feeling and imagination that it should 
be regarded as so realised—in no other way could it find 
so pure an embodiment. Nay, we may add that, so long 
as it was regarded as embodied in him only in the same 
sense in which it flowed out from him to others, so long the 


1 pp. 220, 221. 2p, 140. 2 p. 253. 


220 THE MODERN PERIOD [viti 


primacy attributed to Christ could not obscure the truth. 
It only furnished it with a typical expression, whereby 
the movement of the feelings and the imagination were 
kept in harmony with that of the intelligence.’’+ 

It is not difficult to understand the fascination which 
this idealistic interpretation of Christianity had for many 
deeply religious men who, through the radical criticism of 
the time, had become uncertain of the Christian facts,? and 
this interpretation still has in it elements of permanent 
value. Too often those who have emphasised the truth of 
those historic facts recorded in the Apostles’ Creed have 
forgotten their significance. In this interpretation their 
significance is explored, although their truth as history is 
obscured or denied. We need to explore to the full the 
ideas of which these facts are the embodiments, but, if 
Christianity were concerned with ideas alone, it would be 
at best the highest of all philosophies. It could not meet 
that quest for certainty without which religion loses its 
sanction and its power. For that certainty, the Christ 
‘“‘idea ”’ or “‘ principle’ is not enough. We need the Jesus 
Christ of history and of faith, whom believing men in all 
the Christian centuries have confessed as their living Lord, 
the pledge and vehicle of the world’s redemption. 


The English Kenoticists. 


Of very great importance are the English adaptations of 
the “ kenotic”’ theory, which have been marked by a 
sobriety which has added immensely to its attraction, so 
that this theory has seemed to many to solve the problem 
which has to be faced by those who, sharing in the Church’s 


1 pp. 230, 231. 

* This Idealism was one of the main elements in the ‘‘ New Theology” of the 
Rev. R. J. Campbell which created so great a stir in 1907, and from whose positions 
he has since withdrawn, and of the subsequent Jesus or Christ ? controversy begun 
by a Hibbert Journal article by Mr. Roberts in 1909. An interesting memorial 
of this controversy is the Jesus or Christ ? supplement published by the Hibbert 
Journal in that year. Among its articles is one by Prof. Henry Jones on “ The 
Idealism of Jesus,” which gives concise expression to the view of Christianity we 
have been studying in Edward Caird. 


VIIt] ENGLISH CHRISTOLOGY 221 


faith in the pre-existence and true divinity of the Son of 
God, yet feel compelled to recognise the genuine human 
development of His incarnate life, and the consequent 
limitation of His human knowledge. The doctrine has been 
accepted not only by Free Church writers like Forrest and 
Fairbairn, but by High Anglicans like Gore and Ottley. 

Forrest is content to accept the fact that Christ’s 
“‘ divinity was self-restrained within the limits and con- 
ditions of humanity.”! Fairbairn explains it, much as 
Thomasius did, as a retention of the ethical and internal 
attributes of truth and love, and a limitation of the physical 
and external attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and 
omnipresence.? Dr. Gore pleads, instead, for what is sub- 
stantially Martensen’s form of the kenotic theory ;3 and 
the same view is apparently taught by Canon Ottley, 
although with much reserve and indecision.‘ 

The influence of Dr. Gore’s kenotic theory is clearly seen 
in the elaborate attempt of Dr. Weston, later the Bishop of 
Zanzibar, in his book, T'’he One Christ, 1907, ‘‘ to discover 
the exact content of the Subject, or Ego, of the manhood 
of our Lord.” Init Dr. Weston very confidently advanced 
a modification of Athanasian orthodoxy which he claimed 


1 The Authority of Christ®, p. 100. Dr. Forrest goes on to say: ‘‘ Nothing could 
be more destructive, not only of the spiritual power but of the very credibility 
of the Christian Faith, than to imply that His human nature was but the outer 
mask of His plenary Deity. Nor is it more credible or more true to the record to 
speak of His divine mind and His human mind as operative, and lying as it were in 
juxtaposition, within the same consciousness.”’ In his earlier book, T'he Christ 
of History and of Experience, although he recognised the attractiveness of the 
kenotic theory, he emphasised as much its difficulties (5th edit., pp. 195-204), 

2 Christ in Modern Theology, pp. 476, 477. 

2 For Martensen’s theory, see earlier, p. 182, Dr. Gore’s view found its first 
expression in his essay on “‘ The Holy Spirit and Inspiration ”’ in Lux Mundi, 1889, 
in which he accepted the limitations of Christ’s knowledge, and the impossibility 
of using His utterances as arguments against the conclusions of Old Testament 
criticism. It is very attractively presented in his Bampton Lectures of 1891, and 
receives its fullest expression in his Dissertations of 1895 (especially pp. 202-25), 
In his recent book, Belief in Christ, 1922, Dr. Gore, while concluding that “‘ the 
divine Son in becoming man must have accepted, voluntarily and deliberately, 
the limitations involved in really living as a man,” speaks with still greater reserve 
of the mode and manner of this self-emptying, pp. 225, 226, 

4 The Doctrine of the Incarnation, II., pp. 289, 290, 


222 THE MODERN PERIOD [v1iI 


enabled him to meet the truth for which the kenotic 
theories stand, whilst avoiding what seemed to him their 
peril and their falsehood. There is no “ self-abandonment 
of attributes.”’ There is instead “a self-limitation in the 
exercise of divine powers’ by the incarnate Lord. “ All 
the activities of the unlimited Word ”’ are confined “ to the 
sphere of His eternal, universal relations,’ whilst “‘ His 
manhood, flawless, sinless, perfectly developed, and always 
united with the eternal Son ”’ is “ the measure of the In- 
carnate’s consciousness and power.’’? Thus “ the Incarnate 
is God the Son conditioned in and by manhood. His 
divine powers are always in His possession ; but the con- 
scious exercise of them is controlled by the law of restraint 
which He imposed upon Himself at the moment of the 
Incarnation.” ‘‘ By this law the Incarnate has no possible 
means of self-knowledge or of the exercise of His divine 
powers that He cannot find in the manhood that He has 
assumed. ‘These means are not of fixed content, for as the 
manhood grows and moves onward to its glory its power of 
mediating the divine must necessarily increase. But for 
ever the manhood is the measure of the self-consciousness 
and self-manifestation of the divine Son as Incarnate.’’$ 
The book is notable as an attempt to combine with high 
Alexandrian orthodoxy a recognition of the limitations of 
Christ’s human knowledge, and His avowed ignorance 
(as of the day and hour of the last judgement) which the 
Gospels record. 

We move in a different and more modern world in Dr. 
Forsyth’s The Pérson and Place of Jesus Christ, 1909, where 
the doctrine of Christ’s person is construed, in relation not 
to Greek orthodoxy with its metaphysics of substance, but 
to the moralisation of all dogma and the evangelical 
experience of redemption. Holding that “ the retrospective 
pressure of our faith’ makes the belief in Christ’s pre- 


1 The One Christ, p. 113. 2 Op. cit.,{pp. 322, 323. 
* Op. cit., pp. 204, 205. 4 Op. cit., p. 198. 


vi1r] ENGLISH CHRISTOLOGY 223 


existence necessary, Dr. Forsyth accepts the doctrine of 
Christ’s Kenosis, in spite of the difficulties of the conception, 
for these difficulties are “‘ scientific and not religious,” and 
some of the objections raised are due to unethical conceptions 
of God’s omnipotence. Thomasius’ distinction of attributes 
he rejects. “Instead of speaking of certain attributes to 
be renounced, may we not speak of a new mode of their 
being ? The Son, by an act of love’s omnipotence, set aside 
the style of a God, and took the style of a servant, the 
mental manner of a man, and the mode of moral action 
that marks human nature.”! With this Kenosis or Self- 
Emptying of Christ went His Plerosis or Self-fulfilment. 
With His “subjective renunciation,’ there went “ the 
growth, the exaltation, of His objective achievement, cul- 
minating in the perfecting at once of His soul and our 
salvation in the cross, resurrection and glory.”? The two- 
nature doctrine of Chalcedon Dr. Forsyth rejected. It was 
formulated “‘in the interests of a true redemption,” but 
at a time “ when the theology of redemption was conceived 
in terms of substance rather than subject,” ‘‘ of things 
rather than persons ” ; “‘ when the object of redemption was 
less to forgive man than to immortalise him, less to convert 
him than to deify.” “It was more a communication of 
properties than a communion of hearts and wills.” “ But 
we have come to a time in the growth of Christian moral 
culture when personal relations and personal movements 
count for much more than the relations of the most rare 
and etherial substances.” ‘‘ We are concerned with a rela- 
tion of wills, of the holy will and the unholy.” So our 
Christology “‘ must rest on a moral salvation, spiritually 
and personally realised.’’ To speak of two natures within 
the life of Christ is to fail to do ‘‘ justice to the interests 
of salvation. As that interest is the interest of personal 
communion, and not of human deification, it might be 
better to describe the union of God and man in Christ as 


* The Person and Place of Jesus Christ*, p. 307. 2 Op. Cit., Pp. 329~ 


994 THE MODERN PERIOD [vi11 


the mutual involution of two personal movements raised 
to the whole scale of the human soul and the divine.’’} 

In another book, written also as an expression of Evangel- 
ical faith, Dr. Walker’s weighty and suggestive treatise, 
The Spirit and the Incarnation, 1899, the problem of Christ’s 
person is approached from a somewhat different standpoint. 
The book, as its title denotes, is concerned to relate the 
Incarnation to the doctrine of the Spirit. ‘“ The Spirit 
is the inner essence and element of the life of God as Father 
and as Son, and the energy and influence of God in both 
aspects of the Divine life.”’* Following the Augustinian 
tradition, Dr. Walker rejects any approach to tritheism, 
even such as seems to him to be involved in the phrase, 
The Social Trinity.2 “‘ We cannot take ‘the Son,’ any 
more than ‘ the Logos,’ as representing a person in the God- 
head in anything like the modern sense of the word ‘ person.’ 
Nor can we interpret what Jesus says of pre-existence, as if 
' it applied to His complete personality.”’4 ‘‘ The Son is 
God expressing His own life in voluntary obedience to the 
» Divine Love and Righteousness. . . . It is this that gives 
us the highest and most elevating thought of God—when 
we see Him acting in obedience to His own nature and Law 
of Love; but when the Son is made in any semi-human 
sense a separate person with God, the vision is obscured, 
and we only see this actual self-sacrificing life of perfect 
Love in ‘the Son,’ not in the eternal Father, or God as 
God.’’> So Dr. Walker rejects the ordinary kenotic theories. 
Yet there is “‘ truly a Divine Kenosis ; but it is not that in 
a given moment of time on the part of one existing like a 
human person with God; it is the eternal passing out of 
God as Son from the form of the Divine life in itself to be 
the principle of the creation and His continuous self- 


1 Op, cit., pp. 330-3. Dr. Forsyth here combines with the kenotic theory 
Kahler’s view, on which sce earlier, p. 211. 

* The Spirit and the Incarnation’, p. 245. 

* Op. cit., pp. 224 and 239, Cp. his definition of the Trinity on pp. 352, 353. 

* Op. cit, p. 226. 5 Op. cit., p. 243. 


VIIt] ENGLISH CHRISTOLOGY 225 


impartation thereto, till at length He enters the world in 
the Divine-human personality of Christ, and as the result of 
an ethical process through which Humanity has been made 
susceptible of receiving and expressing the Divine in this 
full personal form.” ‘‘It is God who is incarnate; in a 
true Humanity ; not from beneath, but from above; and 
the Divine and the human are both there in the unity of one 
Divine-human Person.”! Thus “it was the real entrance 
of God as He had, in the person of ‘ the Son,’ gone out into 
the process of creation ; the real entrance of God as Son, 
in Divine-human personal form, into the world; so that 
we have in Jesus Christ not only a human person, but a 
human person in whom a Divine person was incarnate, 
and Christ, on the Divine side, had a personal pre-existence 
in God before the world was.’’? 

This brief account may fitly close with a reference to 
Dr. Mackintosh’s great book, The Doctrine of the Person of 
Jesus Christ, 1912, which contains not only a lucid summary 
. of the Biblical and Historical material, but a full construc- 
tive statement, which takes account of the most varied 
views, and derives light from many a source. With the 
right-wing Ritschlians, Dr. Mackintosh distinguishes 
between the Immediate Utterances of Faith and its 
Transcendent Implicates.? Christian faith finds in Christ 
its object, and inevitably confesses Him as the Exalted 
Lord, who, in His earthly life was truly man, and inherently 
divine. These are faith’s immediate utterances, and we 
can be much more sure of these facts than of our theories. 
Beginning with these facts, Dr. Mackintosh proceeds to 
deal with their transcendent implicates, the Idea of In- 
carnation, the Pre-existence of the Son, the Self-Limitation 
of God in Christ, culminating in Christ’s self-realisation. 
It is a metaphysics, but it is a metaphysics derived, not 
from alien philosophies, but from the inherent necessities 
of Christian faith. It is impossible in the limits of our 

1 Op. cit., p. 278. 2 Op. cit., p. 335. * See earlier, pp. 199-201. 

P 


226 THE MODERN PERIOD [viit 


space to give any adequate idea of this rich and suggestive 
book—and unnecessary, as it is indispensable to every 
serious student of the subject. As Canon Storr remarks, 
** No recent work on Christology is so profound or illumi- 
nating.’’} 

1 Liberal Evangelicalism*, p. 105. 


[IX 
OUR PRESENT PROBLEM 


In the brief space which remains it would be presumptuous 
to attempt yet another reconstruction of the doctrine of 
the person of our Lord. This chapter has a more modest 
aim: briefly to review the Christian facts, and, profiting 
by the lessons of the past, to try to show what seems to 
be the true approach to the problem which these facts 
present. 

Hard as is this task, it is one which cannot be evaded 
except by those who stand at the two extremes of the 
Christian Church. If we see in Christ merely the first true 
believer in God the Father, the supreme religious hero of 
the race, then there is no problem of Christology, for 
Christology, as it has been well said, means the doctrine 
of Christ’s Godhead or it means. nothing. So, too, if we see 
in the formule of the great Councils explanations of Christ’s 
person which are definitive, not only in their content, but 
in their expression, there is likewise no problem to perplex 
us. It is enough if we try to repristinate the ancient 
orthodoxy and to codify its decisions. From the standpoint 
assumed in our discussion, neither method of escape is 
open to us. Facts are prior to theories, and theories 
have value only as hypotheses, which, in some measure, 
explain the facts. We can neither eliminate the problem 
by reducing its data, nor claim that the problem is solved 
by forcing these data into categories which express neither 
the thought nor the experience of modern men. 

Christianity is a religion of revelation and communion. < 

227 


228 OUR PRESENT PROBLEM [rx 


' It presupposes that God has spoken to men in Christ, and 
has in Christ revealed His character and purposes, so that 
men, reconciled and forgiven in Him, may commune with 
|a God they know and trust. Although this revelation, as 
we believe, is final, no doctrine of it can ever be. The 
function of theology is to present, in the categories of its 
age and place, the Church’s acceptance of the revelation 
which has come to us in Christ. Not only are its categories 
thus transient and local, but its data must always be incom- 
plete, for our knowledge of the Christian revelation is 
imperfect, and our appropriation of it is limited, not by 
personal defects alone, but by the defects of our age and 
Church. 

The doctrine of Christ’s person is an attempt to put 
into intelligible language the Church’s realisation of the 
unique significance of Christ. Our knowledge of what 
Christ was, may be increased by our study of the Gospels, 
whilst our understanding of what He means for men, may 
be enlarged by our share in the experience of the Church, 
an experience ever growing through the appropriation 
of fresh resources, in answer to new needs. We cannot 
then leave unexplored the Christian facts, as if it were 
enough for us to have the theories in which past experience 
of those facts once found expression. We have to explore 
for ourselves the significance of Christ, and His place in the 
experience of the Church, and then to seek to express what 
we discover in terms which shall be at once intelligible 
to our age, and congruous with Christian values. 


We have then to begin with an exploration of the 
Christian facts. Briefly we would summarise the already 


i Christian theology has thus to express something which is not ‘ objective ” 
alone, nor ‘‘ subjective’ alone, It is not ‘‘ objective’ alone, for, as the revelation 
has come to us through a Person and is personally received, our knowledge of the 
revelation given is conditioned by our response of faith. It is not ‘‘ subjective ” 
alone, for Christian experience does not create reality, but is created by it, and has 
here its significance, for the cause may be known in part in its effect. 


1x] THE DATA OF CHRISTOLOGY 220 


all too brief account given, in our first two chapters, of the 
Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels and of the classic interpreta- 
tions of His place and person which the New Testament 
provides,? 

We have seen the bewildering diversity of the pictures 
men have given of the synoptic Jesus—a diversity which 
should teach us humility, and make it impossible to attempt 
to reconstruct the life of Jesus, and explain the inner 
meaning of His words and deeds, as if the secret of His soul 
were open to our gaze. However violent, and even perverse, 
some of the recent ‘eschatological’ interpretations of 
Jesus have been, they have at least shown that He belonged 
'to His age, not ours. His supreme interest was not in 
- culture or material progress, but in God, and the Kingdom 
He proclaimed was something very different from that 
extension of knowledge and genial piety which the inevit- 
able march of evolution was to secure for a world not yet 
disillusioned by the tragedy of the Great War. It is impos- 
sible to-day for the faithful student of the Gospels to see 
in them, either the stiff figure of the old orthodoxy—a God 
remote from temptation and from human need—or the 
gracious brother of us all, content to be Himself forgotten 
if only God and man be loved. 

The Gospels know nothing of that “ Jesus of the Gospels,”’ 
who used to be contrasted with the ‘‘ Christ of faith.” He 
will not fit into any of our categories. Harnack has said 
that ‘‘ Jesus formed no part of the Gospel as He proclaimed 
it’; Herrmann, that ‘‘ Jesus knew no more sacred task 
than to point men to Himself.”” Recent discussion seems 
to show that either statement is false in isolation. The 
truth includes them both. The old Apologetic blundered 
when it spoke of the “claims of Christ.” Jesus was not 
concerned to make for Himself formal claims. It was God, 
and God’s Kingdom, that He preached. He made the 


t That the next few pages are a summary of previous chapters must be the excuse 
for what may well appear their undue dogmatism. 


230 OUR PRESENT PROBLEM [1x 


incredible believed. The awful holy God of whom the 
prophets spoke was the God of love, the Father caring for 
every man and desiring each man’s love. But such a 
paradox was credible to His disciples, and can become 
credible to us, only because Christ belonged to His own 
proclamation of God’s grace. The holy God of love is the 
- God in whose life He shared. We can believe in God’s 
Fatherhood just in so far as we see in Christ the Son of 
God and the brother of man. So, when Jesus spoke of 
God’s judgement, He assumed that He would be its agent. 
He revised the Jewish law men held to be the very word 
of God with the confidence of one who knew perfectly 
God’s will. He disposed of men’s lives as if His was the 
authority of God. On the eve of His death, He spoke of 
His life after death, and founded the Feast, which is not 
a memorial to a dead master, but a communion with the 
living Saviour of our lives. 

God was the supreme interest of His life. He called 
men home to their Father God, and yet spoke as if the 
Father was only known in Him. Entirely dependent upon 
God, He yet knew Himself adequate to all men’s needs, 
and, in His colossal consciousness of Sonship, could bid 
the weary and the heavy laden come to Him to find in Him 
both peace and service. His prime concern was not to 
reveal Himself, but to reveal God and the destiny of man. 
Yet He so spoke and lived that this revelation of God and 
of man’s destiny was at the same time a revelation of Him- 
self. Only in Him do we know what God is, and what 
man might be. 

From the beginning, Christ and God were inseparably 
connected in the experience of the Church. Those first 
believers of whom the early chapters of Acts speak, were 
strict monotheists and yet ‘“‘ called upon the name of the 
Lord.” We have no record of any time when faith in 
Christ meant simply trying to imitate the Master’s faith in 
God. The Church knew that it had in Christ its living Lord, 


1x] THE DATA OF CHRISTOLOGY 231 


whose Spirit was working in its midst. The only Chris- 
tianity of which our records speak is a Christianity in which 
Jesus was part of the Christian Gospel, inseparable in 
experience from God Himself. 

It was this unformulated faith which St. Paul expressed 
in the categories of the culture of his age. As we have 
seen, St. Paul was no innovator, He developed; he did 
not originate the Christian message, The Christ he preached 
was no abstraction derived from alien speculation. The 
living Lord he served was one with the Jesus who had lived 
in Galilee, whom some of his contemporaries had known 
onearth. This faith in Christ meant for St. Paul not only 
a new Lord, it meant a transformation of his idea of God, 
and a complete revaluation of the standards by which he 
judged. He had thought of God as taskmaster. Now he 
thinks of Him as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 
God of grace, whose salvation is not earned, but freely 
given. Christ was the image of the Father. His love was 
God’s love; His death, the supreme manifestation of the 
Father’s mercy, Life in Christ was life in God; life in 
God was life in Christ. Here and there it may be possible 
to find in St. Paul’s writings traces of Jewish conceptions 
of God not yet completely Christianised. But in his later 
Epistles especially, it is clear, that for St. Paul Christ was 
more than an intermediary between God and man. He is 
indistinguishable in St. Paul’s experience from God Him- 
self. In Him and Him alone is the grace of God revealed. 

We have the same discovery in the Fourth Gospel. The 
Jesus who shared in human weakness, who knew hunger, 
thirst and sorrow, is the reflection of God. In Him God’s 
glory shines. To know Him is to know God, and this is 
life eternal. To see Him is to see the Father. He is one 
with God, and one with man, and what God is, and man 
might be, is known alone in Him. 

Thus to the first and classic interpreters of Christianity, 
Jesus was not “another God.”’ In their experience God 


232 OUR PRESENT PROBLEM [1x 


- and Jesus were inseparably one. The grace of Christ was 
the grace of God, and to be in the Lord was to be in 
communion with God, the God whom Christ revealed. 
The revelation of God in Christ was not a mere addition 
to knowledge of God already gained. By God they meant 
the God whose holy love had been revealed in Christ, and 
Christ was the risen Lord who had died for men. This faith 
worked out inevitably in love. It carried with it the 
transformation of all values, and every problem, both of 
thought and conduct, they sought to judge in the — 
which comes from Christ’s life and death. 


Such seem to be the Christian facts, and the classic 
experience of them. In the life and death of Jesus, the 
holy love of God has been revealed. That life does not 
belong to the past alone. Christ is for Christians the living 
Lord. Yet faith in Christ does not conflict with faith in 
God. Our faith in Christ is part of our faith in the God 
whom He revealed. It is here that we have the true unity 
of the Christian Church—the bond which unites every 
Christian age and all believing men. It is in our inter- 
pretations that we differ. Such differences are neither to 
be ignored nor over-emphasised. The Christian facts and 
the Christian experience are prior to all theories, and have 
for Christian faith a certainty these theories lack. 

Such theories are not to be shunned. If it is right for 
men to devote their lives to the pursuit of philosophy, it 
is surely right for some, at any rate, in the Church to seek 
for a coherent theory in which to express those Christian 
facts in which, as we believe, the nature of God, and the 
purpose of the universe have been revealed. But such 
theories are of subordinate importance. They are not 
“saving truths’; they are hypotheses, whose sole value 
lies in the adequacy with which they express the Christian 
facts—hypotheses to be abandoned, if later they prove 


1x] THE ANCIENT DEFINITIONS 233 


inadequate to these facts, or if the categories they employ 
lose their vitality and meaning. 

It is from this standpoint that we can understand the 
place and value of the dogmas of the Ancient Church. It 
is unjust to denounce them as sophistications of the Gospel, 
due to the excessive intellectualism of the Greeks. They 
represent less the speculations of the Greeks than the 
common tradition of both East and West, and, if they show 
the influence of Greek ideas, that only proves the success 
with which Christianity had been related to the thought- 
forms of the age. The dogmas of the Church have not 
arisen through the over-subtlety of theologians, the 
pedantry of scholars, or the tyranny of ecclesiastics. They 
are the product of history, the expression of the corporate 
Christian life of a particular period of the Church’s history.} 
. More successfully than the theories they opposed, these 
_ dogmas conserved the common Christian faith in Christ as 
both truly God and truly man, and saved the Church from 
partial and premature solutions, which, by their undue 
simplicity, menaced belief in these prime Christian affirma- 
tions. But the categories employed were inadequate, and 
the philosophy of “‘substance,’’ which lies behind these 
classic definitions, though congruous with the conception 
of Christianity as “‘ deification,”’ is incongruous with the 
conception of Christianity as communion, fellowship 
between God and man. Even within its own limits, the 
ancient orthodoxy was inconsistent. In the doctrine of 
the Trinity, the unity of the Godhead was so strongly 
emphasised that the Son was regarded rather as an eternal 
aspect of God, than as a “‘ person’ in any modern sense. * 
Yet how can an eternal aspect of God be, as the dominant 
Christology asserted, the Son of God who became for our 


1 Cp. Seeberg’s criticism of Harnack and his school (Lehrbuch der Dogmen- 
geschichte®, I., pp. 3-8). 

* Thus Augustine, on whose teaching the definition of the Trinity in the so-called 
Athanasian creed is chiefly based, illustrates the divine Trinity by the trinity in 
the human mind of ‘‘ memory, intelligence and will.” See earlier p, 124, and for 
Schleiermacher’ 8 criticism of the terminology of the creeds, p. 169, 


234 OUR PRESENT PROBLEM {1x 


sakes man, and now reigns in heaven as the exalted Lord ? 
These classic formule are too inconsistent and too obscure, 
too embedded in ways of thought which have lost for us 
their meaning, to save us from the trouble of thinking for 
ourselves on the highest of all themes. 


As in the last two chapters we studied the great specula- 
tive Christologies of modern times, we found that they fell 
into two clearly marked groups. The first, following the 
doctrine of the Trinity implied in the so-called ““Athanasian ”’ 
creed, has sought, at all costs, to assert the unity of God, 
but has been less successful in maintaining the personal 
continuity between the incarnate and the post-incarnate 
Christ ; the second has emphasised this continuity, but, 
though recognising the unity of God, has been compelled 
to assert also His real triplicity. The antithesis between 
these two types of doctrine is not new. It goes back to 
very early times, and represents the two main ways in 
which the person of Christ may be construed. We may see 
in Him a man filled with the Divine, or we may see in Him 
the Son of God incarnate. The first was represented in 
the ancient Church by the School of Antioch, by certain 
aspects of the teaching of Augustine, and later by the 
Christology of Calvinism ; the second was represented by 
the School of Alexandria and was developed later by 
Luther, when he attempted to speculate, and by the 
Schoolmen of the Lutheran Church. Each type of doctrine 
has had its peculiar peril. The first can degenerate easily 
into mere Adoptianism ;! the second has tended to obscure 
the genuine human development of the incarnate Christ.” 

The perils of these two types of doctrine are partly avoided 
in the modern restatements of them, which seek to interpret 


1 As, e.g. in the ‘‘ Dynamic Monarchianism ”’ of Paul of Samosata, on whom, see 
earlier, pp. 85 and 93. 
* As in much Alexandrian Christology. 


Ix] TWO TYPES OF INTERPRETATION 235 


the person of Christ in terms which shall be not only 
intelligible to our age, but expressive of the Gospel records 
of His earthly life, and adequate to the place He has in 
the experiences of believing men. To the first type belong 
the Christologies of Dorner, Kahler and Seeberg; to the 
second, the Christology of Thomasius and of many modern 
writers of the Kenotic school.} 

Dorner’s theory suffered from the undue complexity of 
his subtle and many-sided mind. It received a more 
attractive form in the better unified reconstruction of 
Kahler, and in the bold and simple hypothesis of Reinhold 
Seeberg. To Kahler, as we have seen, the union of the 
divine and the human in the earthly life of Christ was to 
be regarded as “ the reciprocity of two personal movements, 
on the one hand, a generative activity from the standpoint 
of the eternal Godhead, and on the other hand, a receptive 
activity from the standpoint of the developing humanity,” 
so that the human soul of Jesus in its progressive moral 
development so appropriated the content of the divine 
life that it could become the means of God’s saving work 
for men. In like manner, Seeberg explains the paradox 
of Christ’s self-consciousness by the hypothesis that in Him 
“the God-will which guides the history of mankind to 
salvation entered into history,’ creating “the man Jesus 
for its organ, and uniting itself with Him from the first - 
moment of His existence,’ so that in Jesus Christ the 
personal divine will was manifest and operative for the 
salvation of mankind. 

In these theories the traditional discrepancy between the 
doctrines of Christ’s person and of the Godhead is removed, 
for Christ’s person is interpreted in a way which is con- 
gruous with the emphasis laid in the treatment of the 
Trinity on the strict unity of God. These theories are 
congenial with the modern emphasis on the immanence 
of God. They express in more precise and careful language 

1 For the first, see pp. 182-6, 209-14; for the second, pp, 174-82, 220-4, 


236 OUR PRESENT PROBLEM [1x 


what many mean to-day when they explain the person of 
Christ by the absolute immanence of God in Him. Such 
an explanation is not to be denounced. Merely to assert 
the immanence of God in Christ would not suffice. For 
Christian faith, He is not divine only in the same sense as 
others are supposed to be.! But, if we assert the absolute 
immanence of God in Him, we assign to Him a full and 
final place, and such an explanation may well be given by 
many who share in the classic Christian experience of 
Christ’s revealing and redeeming work. 

Attractive as is this type of theory, and admirably as 
it” reconciles the doctrine of Christ with that unitary 
conception of God which the orthodox doctrine of the 
Trinity has endeavoured to conserve, it may be doubted 
if it is best adapted to express the Christian faith. In line 
with classic expositions of the Trinity, it seems remote 
from the conception of Christ’s person which has been 
dominant in popular Christianity, and which has generally 
been upheld by theologians, when they have been concerned, 
not with Trinitarian doctrine, but with Christology. The 
most typica! Christian experience has found in Christ the 
living Lord, and has seen in the Incarnation the sign, not 
only of divine love, but of His own self-abnegation. If we 
interpret His person by the theory of the absolute im- 
manence of God in Him, we are compelled to regard many 
of the most moving expressions of Christian devotion as 
religious symbols, “ picture-words’’ which have to be 
translated from poetry into prose. We may well question 
if such translation is necessary, or can be effected without 
serious loss. We miss much of the amplitude of Christian 
faith, if we think of Jesus, not as the incarnate Son of God, 
but as a God-filled man, the meeting-point of two converging 


1 The failure of such an explanation to give to Christ a distinctive place may be 
illustrated by the story told of Sir Henry Jones. In his earlier days, he used to 
preach in Welsh chapels. A friend, explaining why he had not been asked back 
to one, remarked, ‘‘ They are told that you deny the divinity of Christ.”” To which 
he replied, “I deny the divinity of Christ ! I do not deny the divinity of any man.” 
(Hetherington, I'he Life and Letters of Sir Henry Jones, p. 43.) 


1x] TWO TYPES OF INTERPRETATION 237 


movements, or the expression in human history of the 
“ God-will ’’ for our salvation. Christmas and Easter-day 
then lose much of their supreme significance, and the 
Communion Service, though still the precious memorial 
of the Redeemer’s love, could no longer be regarded as the 
trysting-place of the exalted Lord with His redeemed 
community. To classic Christian faith, Christ has been 
more than an “ adjectival aspect ’’ of God; He has been 
thought of as a “ person ”’ in something like the modern 
sense, the Risen Lord, who knows His people’s needs, and 
is still concerned for their salvation. We seem nearer to 
typical Christian thought if we begin, not with the unity 
of God, which formal treatments of the Trinity have 
usually sought to emphasise, but with the historic Christ 
and the risen Lord. 

For all its seeming simplicity, it is by no means clear 
that the unitary conception of God makes God’s personality 
more comprehensible. Christianity has as its prime 
declaration about God this: that God is good and God is 
love. But, as Dr. Tennant says, “if we are to be in earnest 
with our assertion that goodness and love are essential 
attributes of God,” then it would seem that ‘“‘ we must 
necessarily conceive of the Deity as multi-personal.”? 
Love must have an object. A lonely God could not love. 
We know nothing of created spirits who could be in eternity 
the object of God’s eternal love. It is more congruous 
with Apostolic thought, and with classic Christian experi- 
ence, to think of Christ as the eternal object of God’s love, 
so that we think of God, not as a unitary being, threefold 
in aspect, but as a multiform personality, a divine Society, 
unindividualised by time and space, and perfectly united 
in will, and character, and in interpenetrating love. 

It would seem then that we cannot wisely abandon the 


? From an article in The Congregational Quarterly, Jan., 1925, on The Present 
Position of the Doctrine of the Trinity. See also Dr. Tennant’s article on the Trin- 
ity in the Zxpositor, June, 1919, 


238 OUR PRESENT PROBLEM [ix 


second type of interpretation which sees in Christ not a 
God-filled man, but the Son of God incarnate for our 
salvation. Yet this type of interpretation has its peculiar 
peril. It has tended to obscure the genuine humanity of 
Christ’s incarnate life, and in proclaiming Him as our Lord, 
has forgotten often that He is our brother also. 

Only in modern times have serious attempts been made 
to relate this type of interpretation with the Gospel 
presentation of One who had a human development, and 
who endured real suffering and real temptation. Greatly 
scorned as these attempts have been, they still have much 
to teach us. We cannot indeed do as Thomasius did, and 
begin with speculations about the Trinity, and the pre- 
incarnate Christ. Perplexed as recent Christology has been, 
we can at least learn from it to begin with the historic 
Christ portrayed for us in the Gospel records, and so to 
proceed to the risen and exalted Lord. The doctrine of 
Christ’s pre-existence is not an immediate utterance of 
faith, for it cannot be verified in Christian experience. It 
is a “ boundary thought,” an ultimate implicate of faith. 
Nor can we, with the more venturesome writers of this 
school, discuss the abandonment of Christ’s cosmic functions 
during the incarnate life. Such attempts savour of 
mythology in that they go far beyond what is revealed. 
We dare not, with Thomasius, attempt to distinguish the 
divine attributes, and thus try to show in advance what 
the incarnate life must necessarily be. It is enough for 
us to know what it was, and to see in the historic Jesus 
one who, in the limits of a human life, revealed the holy 
love of the eternal Son, which was the holy love of God. 
We need to retain the religious awe of Calvinism, and 
recognise the unutterable difference between the holy and 
the profane, and yet we may learn from the Kenoticists 
to say with Lutheranism, and in a deeper sense, finitum 
capax infiniti ; man has been so made by God that in a 
finite human life may be revealed the holiness and love 


1x] TWO TYPES OF INTERPRETATION 239 


of God. The Incarnation, if true, is inevitably unique. 
We adore what we see ; we could not have foreseen what 
we adore. The Incarnation is not to be deduced from the 
grace of God. We know that grace through the gift of 
Christ, a grace which is the grace, not of the Father only, 
but of the eternal Son. 

It is right that Christian thinkers should seek to explore 
to the full the implicates of Christian faith. ‘“‘ Thought,” 
as Prof. Sorley says, ‘“‘ refuses to be confined by artificial 
boundaries. The Christian who thinks cannot keep God 
in his soul and leave Him out of His world.”! But theories 
of the Incarnation can only be tentative and provisional, 
and are of subordinate importance. The difference between 
the two types of interpretation should not be over- 
emphasised. The unity is greater than the difference. 
The Christian certainty has to do with the Christian facts 
which are verifiable in Christian experience, not with men’s 
deductions from them. As a great American Churchman 
wrote, “‘ The Gospel of Jesus Christ is so true and so living 
in every part that he who truly possesses it and truly uses 
any broken fragment of it, may find in that fragment 
something—just so much—of gospel for his soul, and 
salvation for his life.”’* Whether we see in Christ the God- 
filled man, or the incarnate Son of God, it matters not so 
much, if we have found in Him the perfect Revealer of God 
and the sufficient Saviour of men. To use a Schoolmen’s 
phrase, we are viatores, not comprehensores, pilgrims, not 
those that have attained. It is enough if we have a 
theologia viatoris, a pilgrim theology, to guide us on our 
pilgrim way. Not for us is the perfect knowledge of those 
who worship the Triune God, unhindered by earthly failure, 
ignorance and sin. The persistence of these two types of 
interpretation should teach the advocates of each patience 
and humility. It will not do to try to close discussion by 


1 Moral Values and the Idea of God, p. 479 (in criticism of SEAN 
3 Du Bose, he Gospel in the Gospels, p. 4. 


240 OUR PRESENT PROBLEM {1x 


falling back on terms describing ancient heresies and calling 
those who differ from us Sabellians, Apollinarians or 
Tritheists. These terms belong to a different world of 
thought from ours. They are not precise enough to serve 
as scientific definitions, whilst to use them as terms of abuse 
is to reveal a temper out of place in the discussion of themes 
so high and hard. 

Much of our difficulty is due to the lack of a recognised 
philosophy, congruous with Christian values, and so able 
to supply Christian theology with its necessary categories. 
And this difficulty is increased by the retention in theology 
of categories which have lost their meaning, and which 
belong to a philosophy pagan, and not Christian, in origin. 
If Christianity be, as we believe, a religion, not of “ deifi- 
cation,’ but of personal communion, then only a philosophy 
which sees in personality the highest category can be 
adequate for its expression. The confusion to-day in 
philosophy is greater even than in theology. As Prof. 
Matthews says, “There is no modern philosophy. There 
are only modern philosophers.”! Yet, in the writings of 
some of these ‘‘ modern philosophers,’ we have already 
the beginnings of a philosophy of personality in which we 
may hope that Christianity may find at last a more congenial 
expression.” 


But if theology and philosophy are to work together 
in a fruitful union, it is not philosophy alone that will 
’ have to be Christianised. The Church’s Christology needs 
itself to be Christianised. Rightly assuming that Christ 
is both God and man, it has too often been more eager to 
show how God and man are united in the person of the 
incarnate Christ, than it has been to give to God and man 

1 Studies in Christian Philosophy, p. 76. 

* Thus in the last few years in England there have appeared such books as 


Pringle-Pattison’s Idea of God, Sorley’s Moral Values and the Idea of God, Webb's 
God and Personality and Matthew's Studies in Christian Philosophy. 


tx} CHRISTIANISATION OF CHRISTOLOGY 241 


their Christian meaning, and thus the very purpose of 
Christ’s work for men has been obscured, and the doctrine 
of His divinity has come to be regarded, not as the glad 
expression of faith in the God whom He revealed, but 
as an unintelligible mystery, which is unrelated to present 
experience, and to the practical necessities of the Church. 
It is possible to call Christ God, and yet still to think 
of God in a pagan way. 

We saw how quickly pagan views of God entered the 
Christian Church. That is indeed the prime distinction 
between the Christianity of the New Testament and the 
Christianity which succeeded to it. To St. Paul, Christ 
was a new Lord, but He was not “‘ another God ” ; He was 
indistinguishable in experience from God Himself. He was 
God’s portrait, and God was known in Him. So, for 
St. John, to see the Son was to see the Father. To know 
Him was to know God with a knowledge which is life 
eternal. With Gentile converts, God was not thus inter- 
preted through Christ. As with converts in India to-day, 
Christ had taken for them the place of all the gods whom 
once they loved and feared. But the pagan idea of God 
remained. God was attributeless and “ impassible,’’! not 
ineffable only, but unknown. The Church rejected the 
extreme consequences of this pagan view of God, and 
expelled the Arianism which made of Christ a creature, who 
yet was to be worshipped. Yet the victory was incomplete, 
for the thought of God remained unchristianised. As 
Canon Streeter has well said, “So far as the imagination 
of the Church is concerned, it has really been the Arian 
who has triumphed.” ‘The doctrine of the impassibility 
of God became a postulate of theology. Men still thought 
of the love of God; they only really meant it when they 
thought of God the Son.” “ The Christian Creed acknow- 
ledges but one God, and one quality of Godhead—so far 
Athanasius won his cause; but the Christian «magsnation 

1 On this doctrine see earlier pp. 74 and 89. 
Q 


242 “OUR PRESENT PROBLEM [rx 


has been driven by the postulate of the impassibility of 
God to worship two. Side by side sit throned in heaven 
God the Father, omnipotent, unchangeable, impassible, 
and, on His right hand, God the Son passus, cructfixus, 
mortuus, resurrectus. What is this but Arianism, routed in 
the field of intellectual definition, triumphing in the more 
important sphere of the object of the belief ? ’’4 

It would be difficult to exaggerate the grave consequences 
of this failure—consequences which still impede the Church’s 
work for men. It has led to the isolation of creed from 
character, and to the substitution of orthodoxy for obedi- 
ence, so that many have been more eager to say the right 
words about Christ, than they have been to live as if they 
believed in His revelation of God’s holy love. It is possible, 
as the sordid story of the controversies on the nature 
of the Incarnation show, to be interested in Christology, 
and yet uninterested in the things for which Christ on earth 
supremely cared. The relation of the divine to the human 
in the incarnate Christ may be obscure, but violence and 
falsehood are clearly opposed to what He taught us of 
God’s truth and grace. When the Sixth Council had done 
its work, and the definitions of orthodoxy were complete, 
God and Christ alike had become remote from Christian 
faith and, as we saw, when the next Council met, it was to 
legalise the veneration of the icons, which had already begun 
to take the place which should have been filled by trust 
in Christ, and in the God whom He revealed. 

We do not know God in a Christian way apart from 
Christ. We miss the prime significance to us of Christ’s 
divinity, if we assume that God is known apart from Him, 
so that it is enough if we call Christ God. Yet that has 
been the method adopted in the great orthodox theologies. 
First, as in Thomas of Aquino, God’s attributes have been 
derived from the natural reason, and even His love 


? From an article in the Hibbert Journal, Jan., 1914, quoted by Pringle-Pattison, 
The Idea of God ,p. 409. 


Ix] CHRISTIANISATION OF CHRISTOLOGY 243 


* proved ” apart from Christ, and then to the conception 
of God, thus gained from alien speculation, there has been 
added the thought, derived from revelation, that this God 
is triune. 

In spite of Luther’s rejection of scholasticism, and his 
intuition that only “in the man Jesus ” is God truly known, 
that became the method of Protestant orthodoxy, and we 
see its effect to-day in incompatible ideas of the character 
of God and Christ, and a confusion in theology, which 
causes many not unnaturally to regard it, not as the living 
expression of the Church’s faith, but as a congeries of 
doctrines which are not only incoherent, but contradictory.+ 

We have to realise that it is only in Christ that we know 
God in any Christian sense. Perplexing as may be the 
records of Christ’s life, hard as we find it to explain Him 
by any of our categories, it is Christ we know, not God, 
and we have to try to interpret God through Him. So 
conceived, the doctrine of Christ’s person is no longer 
a problem in Patristics, or a recondite theory ; it is an 
inevitable expression of the Christian certainty that it is 
in the life and death of Jesus that we have the perfect 
revelation of the character of God. We do not first believe 
in God, and then, in deference to revelation, compel our- 
selves also to believe that God is triune. The message 
which has come to us in Christ is not, in the first place, 
a message of God’s trinity, but of His holy love. But it 


1 To quote again from Dr. Tennant, “‘ Our inherited theology—still almost the 
only kind of theology countenanced as having educational value in our University 
seminaries of sound learning and religious education—is vitiated by Greek alien- 
ations... . Weare taught to conceive of God as before all things Infinite, Perfect, 
Immutable, Impassible, Timeless, Omnipotent—these being the essential attributes, 
and we are left to reconcile with them, how we can—or rather, how we cannot—the 
conception of a living, loving, energizing spirit.” Divine Personality, The Con- 
gregational Quarterly, Oct., 1924. In circles which owe more to Western than 
to Greek Theology the incongruity in popular thought between the character of God 
and of Christ has been due more to theories of the Atonement, which, beginning 
with abstract conceptions of God’s honour or His justice, ‘apart from Christ” 
(remoto Christo as Anselm claimed), in spite of the formal assertion of God’s 
clemency, have emphasised the love of Christ alone—theories which have had 
their nemesis in the attitude of mind revealed in the words of the little Boer girl in 
The Story of an African Farm, “ 1 love Jesus, but I hate God.” 


244 OUR PRESENT PROBLEM {1x 


is as we see in Christ one who Himself belonged to the 
eternal life of God, that this message becomes to us a 
certainty, and not merely a sublime surmise. If by faith 
in God, we mean faith in a God of holy love, then belief 
in the divinity of Christ is not a burdensome addition to 
this faith, but its one adequate support. We can be sure 
of God as Father only when we find in Christ the Son. 

- Inexplicable Christ’s person must always be, for we 
cannot describe it without being enmeshed in the anti- 
nomies of thought, the relation of the eternal to time, and 
of the infinite to space, whilst, when we confess Him to be 
divine, we are speaking of that life of God which must 
always be beyond our earthly comprehension. But in- 
explicable though it be, it yet explains the things we most 
need to know. What does the universe mean? Has it 
a purpose ? Is it directed by a power hostile or indifferent 
to our needs, or is there behind all a God who loves us, and 
whom we can trust ? What of our own lives? Are they 
ephemeral or permanent ? What are we in the world to 
do, and by what standards must life’s task be faced ? 
These, and not the antinomies of thought, are the problems 
we most need to solve. And these problems have in Christ 
their answer. It is, as Heim says, like entering into the 
choir of a Gothic church. From outside, the pattern of the 
stained-glass window seemed meaningless and grey. From 
inside, its meaning and its beauty are luminous and clear. 
That is what our faith in Christ may do for us. Apart 
from Him, much in nature seems purposeless, much in 
history, and, it may be, in our own lives, seems to show 
that, if there be a God, He either does not know, or does 
not care about His children’s needs. But when we have 
found God in Christ, all is changed. As Luther said, “ If 
we are certain of this; that what Christ thinks and 


1 Glaubensgeswissheit*, 1920, p. 200. Heim, in this fresh and powerful recon- 
struction of theology, seeks to show that in Christ there is the solution, not only 
of these practical problems, but of the last antinomies of thought. 


1x] CHRISTIANISATION OF CHRISTOLOGY 245 


speaks and wills, the Father also wills, then I can defy 
all that may fight and rage against me. For here in Christ 
I have the Father’s heart and will.’’! And if in Christ we 
have ‘‘ the Father’s heart and will,” then we have a know- 
ledge of God, and of the method of His working, and of 
the goal of human history, adequate for our Christian task. 
It is true that we see but dimly, but that is not because 
we are in darkness, but because our eyes are unused as yet 
to the light which comes to us from Christ. 

The doctrine of Christ’s person cannot then be dealt 
with in isolation. If by ‘“ explain,’ we mean “ classify,” 
it is clear that this is a doctrine which can never be 
explained, for, in confessing that Christ is divine, we affirm 
that in His place and function He is without parallel or 
peer. But, although it cannot be explained, its significance 
can be understood, as we interpret it in the whole context 
of Christian thought and practice. So long as the problem 
of Christology was conceived as the problem of the inter- 
relation of the divine and human natures in the incarnate 
person, its solution inevitably appeared as a technicality 
of theologians, which ordinary Christians could not hope to 
understand, and must, instead, receive as a sacred mystery, 
to be accepted as part of their obedience to the Church. 
If, instead of speaking as if Christ were the unknown 
quantity which had to be resolved in terms of God and 
man, we begin with the historic Christ, and find in His life 
the revelation of the holy love of God, then the doctrine 
of His divinity becomes the concern of every believing man, 
for it is the expression of our Christian certainty in the 
revelation which He brought. It is not just one of many 
Christian doctrines. It is the foundation of them all, and 
every Christian doctrine is an explication of its truth. 


Thus this doctrine is more than a doctrine; it commits 


* Herrmann, Communion of the Christian with God, E.T.,? p. 155, 


246 OUR PRESENT PROBLEM [Ix 


us to a way of life. If in Christ God has been revealed, 
then we know, not only that God is holy love, but that 
. holy love has final and eternal value. It would seem that 
it is this which it is the special task of our age to explore. 
Every age has its distinctive task. The great speculative 
theologies arose in ages of speculation. Ours is not a 
speculative age. Instead, we are confronted, no longer with 
an austere agnosticism, which, distrustful of the super- 
natural, sought to conserve its morality, but with modes 
of thought, whose challenge is directed, less against the 
Christian creed, than against the Christian way of life. 
In Christianity it is harder far to obey than it is to believe, 
but that harder task is not one which can be evaded. 
Our need, in such an age as ours, is less for a correct Chris- 
tology than for the practical assertion of the validity of 
those Christian values which our faith in Christ involves. 

Christianity is not an ethic, but a Gospel. It comes 
to us, not as a command, but as a message of the holy 
love of God revealed in Christ’s life and death. But, if we 
accept that message, we are committed to judge in all 
things by its values. So long as Christ seems to us only 
the greatest of all teachers, we are not thus bound to give 
Him that self-surrender which is another name for Christian 
faith. His revelation of God might be imperfect, and, as 
we could not be sure just where that imperfection lay, we 
could excuse ourselves for our partial acceptance of His 
ethical and spiritual ideals. There is no inconsistency, for 
instance, when Bousset, the author of one of the loveliest 
and most popular of the “‘ liberal ” lives of Jesus, remarks, 
in another book, that Jesus laid too much stress on redemp- 
tion from the world, and did not proclaim, as we moderns 
do, “‘ the duty of self-preservation, self-assertion, and strife 
for world dominion.”! There is inconsistency, if, while 
we profess to believe in Christ’s divinity, we refuse to 
accept the values to which that faith commits us. 


1 Das Wesen der Religion, 1906 edit., p. 208. 


Ix] CHRISTIANISATION OF CHRISTOLOGY 247 


Thus the doctrine of Christ’s divinity is the most practical 
of all truths, and is in intimate relation to the urgent racial 
and social problems of our time. If, in the human life of 
Jesus, God has been made manifest, then it is from Him 
that the Christian idea of God derives its meaning. God 
is as He was, and the way He judged of life is the way 
God judges. The ideals Christ taught, the values He 
revealed, all His character of grace and truth, are norma- 
tive and final, and must have for all Christian people 
supreme authority. We cannot claim to believe in Him, 
and yet be content to leave the standards by which we 
judge unchristianised, unrelated to our confession. It is 
useless to call Him Lord, Lord, unless we seek to do the 
things which He commanded ; useless to proclaim Him 
very God and very man, unless we are trying to think 
after Him His thought of God and man, to trust the God 
whom we have seen in Him, and show, in deed as well as 
word, that we are judging of life, so far as we are able, by 
the values He reveals. 


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BIBLIOGRAPHY ? 


\ 


On THE WHOLE PERIOD.—Dorner, History of the Development 
of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, E.T., 5 vols., 1861-3. 
Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ?, 1881. Schultz, Die Lehre 
von der Gottheit Christt, 1881. Gore, The Incarnation of the 
Son of God (Bampton Lectures for 1891), and Belief in Christ, 
1922. Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 
1893. Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation”, 1902. Sanday, 
Christologies, Ancient and Modern, 1910. Mackintosh, The 
Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ®, 1913, 


On CuaptTers I anp II.—Stevens, The Theology of the New 
Testament, 1901. Cambridge Biblical Essays, 1909. Foun- 
dations, 1912. C. A. Scott, Dominus Noster, 1918. Jackson 
and Lake, The Beginnings of Christianity, I. 1, 1920. McNeile, 
New Testament Teaching in the Light of St. Paul’s, 1923. 
Some of the most valuable material in English is to be found 
in the standard commentaries: e.g. in the International 
Critical Commentary: Allen on St. Matthew, Sanday and 
Headlam on Romans, Burton on Galatians, Moffatt on Hebrews, 
Brooke on Z'he Johannine Hpistles, Charles on Revelation : 
in the Hxpositor’s Greek New Testament : Denney on Romans, 
Kennedy on Philippians, Peake on Colossians, Moffatt on 
Revelation : in Macmillan’s Series: McNeile on St. Matthew, 
Swete on St. Mark, Lightfoot on Philippians and Colossians, 
Armitage Robinson on Ephesians: in the Century Bible : 
Box on St. Matthew, Vernon Bartlet on St. Mark, Peake on 
Hebrews, C. A. Scott on Revelation; also 8. C. Carpenter, 
Christianity According to St. Luke. 

Of the many German manuals on New Testament Theology, 
especially Holtzmann, Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Theo- 
logie?, 1911; Feine, Theologie des Neuen Testaments®, 1919 


1 The literature is so immense that any brief selection from it, such as is here 
given, must inevitably be arbitrary and individual. It has seemed best to confine 
the Bibliography as far as possible to recent English books, The edition cited is 
shown by the index number. 


Q* 249 


250 BIBLIOGRAPHY 


(4th edit. of 1922, an abbreviation); Weinel, Biblische Theo- 
logie des Neuen Testaments*®, 1921, written respectively from 
the ‘‘ Liberal,” “‘ Positive,” and Religio-historical standpoints. 


On CHAPTER I.—Wendt, The Teaching of Jesus, E.T., 2 vols., 
1892. Titius, Jesw Lehre vom Reiche Gottes, 1895. Wrede, 
Das Messiasgeheimms in den Hvangelien, 1901. Bousset, 
Jesus, E.T., 1906. Du Bose, The Gospel in the Gospels, 1906. 
Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus, 1907. Sanday, 
The Life of Christ in Recent Research, 1907. Nolloth, The 
Person of our Lord in Recent Thought, 1908. Denney, Jesus 
and the Gospel’, 1913. Moffatt, The Theology of the Gospels, 
1912. Wernle, Jesus, 1916. Glover, The Jesus of History, 
1917. Findlay, Jesus as They saw Him, 1920. Headlam, 
The Infe and Teaching of Jesus the Christ, 1923. Burton, 
A Source Book for the Study of the Teaching of Jesus, 1923. 
Peake, The Messiah and the Son of Man, 1924. Streeter, 
The Four Gospels, 1924. On the “ eschatological ’”’ problem : 
Baldensperger, Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu?, 1892. Johannes 
Weiss, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, 1892 (2nd edit., 
1900). Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, .T., 
1910. E. F. Scott, The Kingdom and the Messiah, 1911. 
Maldwyn Hughes, The Kingdom of Heaven, 1922. Hogg, 
Redemption from the World, 1922. 


On CHAPTER IT.—J. Weiss, Urchristentum, 1917. Kennedy, 
The Theology of the Hpistles, 1919. Sabatier, The Apostle Paul, 
E.T., 1891. Bruce, St. Paul's Conception of Christianity, 
1896. Deissmann, Die neutestamentliche Formel, ‘‘ in Christo 
Jesu,” 1892; Paul: A Study in Social and Religious 
History, 1912; and The Religion of Jesus and the Faith of 
Paul, 1923. Titius, Der Paulinismus unter dem Gesicht- 
spunkt der Seligkeit, 1900. Weinel, St. Paul, E.T., 1906. 
Wrede, Paul, E.T., 1907. Du Bose, The Gospel according to 
Paul, 1907. Olschewski, Die Wurzeln der Paulinischen 
Christologie, 1909. Moffatt, Paul and Paulinism, 1910. 
Garvie, Studies in St. Paul and His Gospel, 1911. Gardner, 
The Religious Experience of St. Paul, 1911. Schweitzer, 
St. Paul and His Interpreters, E.T., 1912. Headlam, St. Paul 
and Christiamty, 1913. Morgan, The Religion and Theology 
of Paul, 1917. Peake, The Quintessence of Paulinism, 1917. 
Ross, The Faith of St. Paul, 1923. Peabody, The Apostle Paul 
and the Modern World, 1923. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 251 


On the Religio-historical controversy: MReitzenstein, 
Poimandres, 1904, and Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen?, 
1920. Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, 
E.T., 1911. Clemen, Primitive Christianity and its Non- 
Jewish Sources, 1912. Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery 
Religions, 1913. Wendland, Die hellenistisch-rdmische 
Kultur’, 1912. Lake, The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul?, 1919. 
Brickner, Der sterbende und auferstehende Gottheiland?, 1920. 
Bousset, Kyrios Christos?, 1921 ; and for a general account of 
the Mystery Religions, Angus, The Mystery Religions and 
Christianity, 1925. 

Ménégoz, La Théologie del’ Epitre aux Hebreux, 1894. Bruce, 
The Epistle to the Hebrews?, 1899. Macneill, The Christology 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 1914. Nairne, The Epistle of 
Priesthood?, 1915. E. F. Scott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, 
1922. 

Law, The Tests of Infe? (on 1 John), 1914. E. F. Scott, 
The Fourth Gospel?, 1908. Rendel Harris, The Origin of the 
Prologue to St. John, 1917. Stanton, The Gospels as Historical 
Documents III, 1920. Garvie, The Beloved Disciple, 1922. 
For Philo: Drummond, Philo Judeus, 2 vols., 1888 (sum- 
marised in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, V, pp. 197-208), 
and Kennedy, Philo’s Contribution to Religion, 1919. 


On Cuaprers JII-VI.—Fisher, Hvstory of Christian 
Doctrine*, 1897 (also for Chapters VII and VIII). Harnack, 
The History of Dogma, E.T., 7 vols., 1894-9 (summarised in 
his Grundriss der Dogmengeschichte®, 1914). Loofs, Leitfaden 
der Dogmengeschichte*, 1906; the 3rd and greatly enlarged 
edit. of Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 4 vols., 
1913-23 (as full as Harnack’s Lehrbuch, and has the advantage 
of being less brilliant). Briggs, Theological Symbolics, 1914. 
For the history of the Christian religion of which theology is 
the expression, Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God?, 1908, Vol.IT, 
and Heiler, Das Gebet*, 1921. 


On CHaptrerRsS III anp IV.—Bethune-Baker, An Introduc- 
tion to the Early History of Christian Doctrine, 1903. Workman, 
Christian Thought to the Reformation, 1911. Tixeront, History 
of Dogmas (to A.D. 800), E.T., 3 vols., I? 1921, IT 1914, TIT 
1916 (fully documentated). For the historical background, 
Gwatkin, Harly Church History?, 2 vols., 1912, and Studies 


252 BIBLIOGRAPHY 


in Arianism*, 1900. Duchesne, Harly History of the Christian 
Church, E.T., 3 vols., 1909-24. Kidd, A History of the Church 
to A.D. 461, 3 vols., 1922. Much valuable material will be 
found in Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, 1886. 
Gore, Dissertations, 1895. Du Bose, The Ecumenical Councils, 
1897. Harnack, Expansion of Christianity, E.T.*, 2 vols., 
1908. Glover, Lhe Conflict of Religions in the Karly Roman 
Empire?, 1918. Moody, The Mind of the Early Converts, 1920. 
McGiffert, The God of the Early Christians, 1924. 

For translations: Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, 1 vol., edit. 
of texts and translations edited by Harmer, 1891; The Ante- 
Nicene Library ; The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. 

The original texts of creeds and symbols are best given in 
Hahn, Bibliothek der Symbole und Glaubensregeln der alten 
Kuirche*, 1897. Texts and translations, of the Creed of Nicewa, 
Cyril’s Three Letters, Leo’s Tome and the Chalcedonian De- 
finition, are given in Bindley, Gicwmenical Documents of the 
Faith, 1899. For Apollinarius, Lietzmann’s critical edition 
of the fragments in his Apollinaris von Laodicea und Seine 
Schule, 1904. Raven, Apollinarvanism, 1923. For Nestorius : 
Loofs, Nestoriana, 1905. Bethune-Baker, Nestorius and his 
Teaching, 1908. Loofs, Nestoriws and His Place in Christian 
Doctrine, 1910. Nau, Le Livre d’Héraclide de Damas, 1910 
(an annotated E.T. of the Syriac original is in preparation, 
and will be published shortly by the Oxford Press). For the 
controversies which led up to, and followed, the Council of 
Chalcedon: Relton, A Study in Christology?, 1922 (a full 
description and defence of the Enhypostasia doctrine), 


On CHaptreR V.—Augustine’s importance is well described 
in Harnack, History of Dogma, E.T., Vol. V. The writings of 
Augustine most relevant to this chapter: his On the Trinity, 
On Christian Doctrine, the Enchiridion, and the Confessions, 
are translated in Vols. VII, IX and XIV of the E,T. edited 
by Marcus Dods. St. Bernard, Cantica Canticorum (Eighty- 
six Sermons on the Song of Solomon), E.T. by Eales, 1895. 
The Summa Theologica of Thomas of Aquino, E.T. by English 
Dominican Fathers (Vol. II dealing with the Trinity, Vols. 
XV and XVI with the Incarnation and Christology). Cuthbert 
Butler, Western Monasticism, 1922. Coulton, Five Centuries 
of Religion, I, 1923. In the Hustories of Dogma already men- 
tioned, the fullest account of Medieval Theology is given in 
Seeberg, Vol, III (Die Dogmengeschichte des Mittelalters), 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 253 


For CHAPTERS VI-VII.—Dorner, History of Protestant 
Theology, E.T., 2 vols., 1871. Alexander, Morces of Modern 
Religious Thought, 1920. 


For Cuaprer VI.—Lindsay, A History of the Reformation, 
2 vols., 1906; The Cambridge Modern History, Vol. II, 1903. 
McGiffert, Protestant Theology before Kant, 1911. 

For Luther’s early development: Scheel, Dokuwmente zu 
LIuthers Entwicklung bis 1519 (a very useful source book), 
1911. Strohl, L’évolution religieuse de Luther jusqu’en 1515, 
1922, and L’épanouissement de la pensée religieuse de Luther 
(1515-1520), 1924. lLuther’s Primary Works of 1520 are 
translated by Wace and Buchheim (2nd edit., 1896, containing 
also Luther’s two Catechisms). Luther’s religion is described 
in Herrmann, Communion of the Christian with God Discussed 
on the Basis of Luther's Statements, 1..'T.?, 1906, and by Wernle, 
Luther, 1918. Luther’s theology is fully described in Seeberg, 
Die Lehre Luthers (Lehrbuch der Dogmensgeschichte, IV, 1), 
1917. 

For Melancthon: Plitt-Kolde, Die Loci Communes in ihrer 
Urgestalt?, 1900. For Calvin: Wernle, Calvin, 1919. Hunter, 
The Teaching of Calvin, 1920. Bauke, Die Probleme der 
Theologie Calvins, 1922 (a concise description of recent 
research). E.T. of Calvin’s works published by the Calvin 
Translation Society. The Institutes are reprinted from this 
in two volumes, 1869. For the Christological controversies of 
scholastic Lutheranism : Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 
II, 1855. For the Reformed Theology : Hastie, T'he Theology 
of the Reformed Church, 1892. The Protestant Confessions are 
given in Schaff, A History of the Creeds of Christendom, Vol. 
Ill; The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches, 1877. 
For Socinianism: Fock, Der Socinianismus, 1847; The 
Racovian Catechism, E.T., by Rees, 1818. 


On Cuapters VII anv VIII.—Pfleiderer, The Development 
of Theology in Germany since Kant, 1890. Oman, The Problem 
of Faith and Freedom, 1906. E.C. Moore, A History of Chris- 
tian Thought since Kant, 1912. La Touche, The Person of 
Christ in Modern Thought, 1912. Widgery, Jesus in the 
Nineteenth Century and After, 1914 (an English adaptation of 
Weinel, Jesus im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, now in 3rd edit., 
1914). H. W. Clark, Liberal Orthodoxy, 1914. For German 


254 BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Christology : Faut, Die Christologie seit Schlecermacher, 1907. 
Giinther, Die Entwicklung der Lehre von der Person Christi im 
XIX Jahrhundert, 1911 (the standard work). For German 
theologians: Lichtenberger, History of German Theology in 
the Nineteenth Century, E.T., 1889; and for the religious 
background of German theology: R. Seeberg, Die Kirche 
Deutschlands im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 1903. 


On CuapterR VII.—Cross, The Theology of Schletermacher, 
1911 (contains a valuable epitome of The Christian Faith). 
Selbie, Schleiermacher, 1913. Schleiermacher’s Reden have 
been translated by Oman, On Religion. Speeches to tts 
Cultured Despisers, 1893. Der Christliche Glaube is still un- 
translated. A convenient text is the Gotha edition in four 
volumes, 1889. E.T. of the paragraph headings of the Ist 
and 2nd editions by Baillie, The Christian Faith in Outline, 
1922. The German literature on Schleiermacher is immense, 
Short bibliographies are given in Cross and Selbie. 


Ullmann, The Sinlessness of Jesus, K.T. (from 6th German 
edit.), 1857. C. I. Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine, 
E.T. (from 5th German edit.), 1849. Sartorius, The Doctrine 
of Divine Love, E.T. (from German edit. of 1842-56), 1884. 
Thomasius, Christe Person und Werk, I and II, 1853-5. Mar- 
tensen, Christian Dogmatics, E.T., 1866. Bensow, Die Lehre 
von der Kenose, 1903. Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, 
E.T., 4 vols., 1880-2. 

For English Theology: Storr, The Development of English 
Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 1800-60, 1913. McLeod 
Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 1855 (6th edit., 1886). 


On CuHapteR VIII.—Ritschl, The Christian. Doctrine of 
Justification and Reconciliation, E.T., 1900, of Vol. III of his 
Die Christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Verséhnung, 
first published in 1870-4. An E.T. of his Instruction in the 
Christian Religion is given in Swing, The Theology of Albrecht 
fivischl, 1901. The standard book on Ritschlianism is still 
Garvie’s The Ritschlian Theology*, 1902. Shorter and more 
recent books are Mozley, Riétschlianism, 1909. Edgehill, 
Faith and Fact; A Study of Ritschlianism, 1910, and R. 
Mackintosh, Albrecht Ritschl and His School, 1915 (contains 
a very valuable description of the recent modifications of the 
school), 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 255 


For the Ritschlians: Herrmann, The Communion of the 
Christian with God, E.T.?, 1906. J. Kaftan, Dogmatik*, 1909 ; 
Zur Dogmatik, 1904. Haering, The Christian Faith, K.T., 
1915. Harnack, What is Christianity ? K.T.3, 1904. For the 
“Life of Jesus” and ‘‘ Eschatological’’ controversies see 
under Chap. I, and also Loofs, What is the Truth about Jesus 
Christ ? 1913. For Troeltsch: Die Absolutheit des Chris- 
tentums und die Religionsgeschichte?, 1912 (fully described in 
Bouquet, Js Christianity the Final Religion ? 1921), and 
Christian Thought, 1923. For a general account of his writings : 
Sleigh, The Sufficiency of Christianity, 1923. Kahler, Dre 
Wissenschaft der Christlichen Lehre®, 1905 ; Angewandte Dog- 
men, II, 1908. For the Modern-Positive School: R. Seeberg, 
The Fundamental Truths of the Christian Religion, E..T., 1908 ; 
Zur Systematischen Theologie, 1909; Dogmatik, I, 1924. 
Griitzmacher, Studien zur Systematischen Theologie, I and IIT, 
1905, 1909. Schaeder, Theozentrische Theologie, 17, 1916, IT, 
1914. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, .T., 1923. 

For English Christology: T. H. Green, Lay Sermons, re- 
printed in Works, III, 5th imp., 1906. EK. Caird, The Evolution 
of Religion’, 1899. Gore, Dissertations, 1895. Forrest, The 
Christ of History and of Experience®, 1906; The Authority of 
Christ®, 1907. Walker, The Spirit and the Incarnation, 1899. 
Carnegie Simpson, The Fact of Christ, 1900. Weston, The One 
Christ, 1907. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 
1909. Garvie, The Christian Faith and the Modern Perplexity, 
1910. Temple, Christus Veritas, 1924. A variety of modern 
views will be found in the Hibbert Journal Supplement; Jesus 
or Christ ? 1909; and in the Modern Churchman, September, 
1921, which contains the papers read at the Girton Conference 
on Christ and the Creeds, 


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INDEX 


Abrahams, 12, 24 

Adam and Christ, 41 f. 

Adoptianism, 33, 40, 72, 85, 234 

Alexander, 93, 97f. 

Alexandrian and Antiochene 
Christology compared, 195, 
109, 113, 151, 185, 234 

Anselm, 127 f., 243 

Apollinarianism, 104—9, 111 f. 

Apostles’ Creed, 81, 127, 139 

Arius, 97 f., 103 

Athanasian Creed, 124, 127, 183, 
233 £; 

Athanasius, 93-102, 104, 107f., 
241 

Augsburg Confession, 146 

Augustine, 122-7, 149f., 183, 
233 


Baldensperger, 20, 203 

Barnabas, Epistle of, 71 

Bartlet, 22 

Basil, 102, 104, 108 f. 

Bauke, 153 

Bensow, 43, 176, 182, 210 

Bernard, St., 128-31, 194 

Bethune-Baker, 110, 112 

Bouquet, 206 

Bousset, 33, 42, 52, 72, 202, 206, 
246 

Brenz, 146 f. 

Brooke, 59 

Bruce, 120, 147, 153, 182 

Brickner, 46 

Burkitt, 14, 29 

Burney, 64 

Burton, 36 


Cesarea, Creed of, 93, 99 
Caird, E., 218 fi. 


Calvin, 148—153 

Campbell, McLeod, 187 f. 

Campbell, R. J., 220 

Cerinthus, 59 f. 

Chalcedon, Council of, 102, 115 

Chalcedon, Definition of, 115f., 
120, 181 

Charles, 12 f., 58 

Chemnitz, 147 

Clement of Alexandria, 88 ff. 

Clement of Rome, 70 f. 

Colet, 138 

Constantinople, Councils of, 
10243 122. 3168: 

Coulton, 128 

Cross, 165 

Cyril, 110, 112-7. 


Deism, 157 f. 

Deissmann, 37 f. 

Diognetus, Epistle to, 73 
Dionysius the Areopagite, 121 
Dorner, 174, 181-6, 210, 235 
Drews, 203 

Drummond, 65 

Du Bose, 239 

Duchesne, 120 

Duns Scotus, 134 
Dyothelitism, 117 


Eekhart, 129 

Emmet, 16 

Einhypostasia, 116 

Ephesus, Council of, 112 

Eschatological Interpretation, 
12-28, 203 ff. 

Eusebius of Cesarea, 
119 

Eusebius of Nicomedia, 98 

Eutyches, 114 


93, 99, 


257 


258 


Fairbairn, 221 

Feine, 47 

Fock, 155 f. 

Formula of Concord, 147, 181 
Forrest, 22, 221 

Forsyth, 222 ff. 

Franks, 83 


Garvie, 23, 26, 66, 192 
Gess, 182 

Gibbon, 118 

Gifford, 43 

Glover, 67 

Gnosticism, 78-82, 84, 89 
Gore, 72, 221 

Green, T. H., 217 f. 
Gregory of Nazianzus, 102, 108 f. 
Gregory of Nyssa, 102, 108 
Griittzmacher, 208, 212 
Ginther, 173, 195 


Haering, 199 ff. 

Harnack, 15, 80, 83, 116, 126, 
157, 202, 229, 233 

Harris, Rendel, 64, 67 

Hastie, 149 

Hatch, 117 f. 

Headlam, 16 

Hegelianism, 80, 
217-20 

Heiler, 129, 134 

Heim, 244 

Henoticon, 116 

Hermas, Shepherd of, 71 f. 

Herrmann, 196 ff. 

Hetherington, 236 

Hippolytus, 85 

Hogg, 15 

Holtzmann, 42 

Homoousios, 91, 99-102, 119 

Hort, 63, 103, 187 

Hosius, 99 f. 


173 f., 185, 


Ignatius, 74 f. 

Ihmels, 196, 208 f. 

Impassibility of God, 74, 89 f., 
108, 241, 243 

Inge, 65 

Trenzeus, 59, 80-3 


INDEX 


Jackson and Lake, 11, 23 
John of Damascus, 116, 121 
Jones, Sir Henry, 220, 236 
Jilicher, 46 f. 

Justin, 75 ff. 


Kaftan, J., 21, 37, 192, 198 f. 

Kahler, 209 ff., 202, 224, 235 

Kennedy, 42 ff., 65 

Kenosis, 42 ff., 107, 147, 174-82, 
220-3, 238 

Kidd, 75, 112, 115 

Kirn, 201 

Krypsis, 147 


Lake, 52 

Law, 59 

Leckie, 13, 17 

Leland, 157 

Leo, 112, 114f. 

Leontius, 116 

‘* Liberal ’’ (sense in which used, 
203); ‘‘ Liberal’’ interpreta- 
tion of Jesus, 9, 13, 15, 201-6 

Lietzmann, 106 f. 

Lindsay, 136, 

Logos, 55, 63-7, 77 f., 90, 182 

Loofs, 78f., 100, 110 ff., 136, 
138, 181, 195 

‘* Lord;"/33, 48, b2 fs 

Luther, 136-46, 152, 154, 159, 
170, 192, 234, 245 


Mackintosh, H. R., 225 f. 

MacNeill, 54 

Marburg Colloquy, 145 

Martensen, 182, 221 

Matthews, 240 

Melancthon, 143 ff., 171 

Ménégoz, 56-7 

Missionary parallels, 34, 38 f., 51, 
68 f., 78 f., 241 

Moffatt, 22, 54 f. 

Monarchianism, 84f., 93, 100, 234 

Monophysitism, 116 f. 

Monothelitism, 117 

Moore, G. F., 64 

Morgan, 41, 52 


INDEX 


Nau, 110 ff. 

Neander, 163 

Nestorianism, 109-15, 151 
Nicea, Councils of, 93, 99 f., 121 
Nicea, Creed of, 99 f., 103, 181 
Nicene Creed, 103, 117 f. 
Nitzsch, 173 

Noetus, 85, 93 


Otto, 29, 142, 152, 215f. 
Origen, 88, 90-3, 97 


Patripassianism, 85 

Paul of Samosata, 85, 93 
Peake, 24 

Pfleiderer, 171 

Philo, 42, 55 ff., 64 ff. 

** Positive ’’ School, 211 f., 217 
Praxeas, 85 ff., 93 
Pringle-Pattison, 240, 242 


Raven, 104, 106 ff. 
Reischle, 192 
Reitzenstein, 42, 50, 64, 78 
Relton, 116 

Ritschl, 129, 186, 189-96 
Roberts, 220 

Robertson, A., 99 
Robertson, F. W., 187 
Rougier, 86 


Sanday and Headlam, 35 

Sartorius, 176 

Schaeder, 215 

Scheel, 136 f. 

Schleiermacher, 160-73 

Schultz, 141, 144 

Schweitzer, 9, 16 ff., 26, 205 

Scott, E. F., 29, 54 £., 65 

Seeberg, R., 82, 93, 109, 120, 
122, 144 ff., 170, 185, 211-4, 
235 

Servetus, 153 

Sihler, 90 

Sleigh, 206 


259 


Socinianism, 154—7 

Sorley, 239 f. 

Stanton, 66 

Staupitz, 137 

Stephan, 192 

Storr, 187, 226 

Streeter, 16, 20, 22, 66, 205, 241 
Strohl, 136, 138 


Tennant, 237, 243 

Tertullian, 79, 81—7, 100 

Theopaschitism, 181 

Theotokos, 110 f., 115 

Thomas of Aquino, 131-4, 138, 
242 

Thomas 4 Kempis, 135 


Thomasius, 147, 174-82, 185, 
221, 223, 235, 238 
Tindal, 157 


Titius, 15, 35, 47 
Tixeront, 91, 105, 113 
Toland, 157 
Troeltsch, 206—9 


Ullmann, 173 


Valentinus, 79 
Value-Judgements, 192 


Walker, 224 f. 

Watts-Dunton, 160 

Webb, 86, 240 

Weinel, 5] f. 

Weiss, J., 17 £., 32, 38, 42, 47, 
204 

Wendt, 15, 202 

Wernle, 149 

Wesley, Charles, 175 

Westcott, 64 

Weston, 221 f. 

William of Occam, 134, 136, 144 

Wrede, 23, 46, 49 f., 203 


Zinzendorf, 158, 175 
Zwingli. 144 ff. 


of RS 
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Theological iii i 


2 0102 


1 101 





